ESA awards Spanish launch startup PLD a million-plus development contract
Capitalism in space: The European Space Agency (ESA) today awarded the Spanish launch startup PLD a €1.3 million contract to develop a payload deployment system for its Miura-5 orbital rocket, expected to make its first launch in 2025.
Designed to release all types of satellites with as much flexibility as possible, the payload system – called MOSPA for Modular Solution for Payload Adapter – will allow PLD Space to offer its customers a wider range of missions and services, including accommodation of CubeSats, nanosatellites and microsatellites. The development of the modular payload adapter will be done in partnership with OCCAM Space. The goal is to create the hardware to be as light as possible while also being as adaptable as possible to launch more satellites and meet market demands.
“PLD space has proven itself with its first launch last year, and we look forward to seeing the experience applied to the Miura 5 launch services development,” says ESA’s Jorgen Bru, “The payload adapter development engaged today was chosen to increase market competitiveness and ensure that many different types of satellites and customers can fly.”
This contract once again signals ESA’s shift from depending solely on its own launch company, Arianespace, to instead obtaining launch contracts from as many private, independent, and competing European companies as possible. Arianespace, for many reasons (some not its fault), failed to develop rockets capable of competing with SpaceX, and also failed to get them developed on time. ESA presently has no launch capability, and has had to sign contracts with SpaceX to get its payloads into orbit.
The shift is ground-shaking. It suggests that in the next two decades Europe should have a half dozen competing rocket companies of its own, all striving for business and thus all working hard to come up with ways to reduce launch costs. Under the Arianespace monopoly, little innovation took place, launch costs never dropped, and though for many years it controlled a majority of the launch market, it could never make a profit.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Capitalism in space: The European Space Agency (ESA) today awarded the Spanish launch startup PLD a €1.3 million contract to develop a payload deployment system for its Miura-5 orbital rocket, expected to make its first launch in 2025.
Designed to release all types of satellites with as much flexibility as possible, the payload system – called MOSPA for Modular Solution for Payload Adapter – will allow PLD Space to offer its customers a wider range of missions and services, including accommodation of CubeSats, nanosatellites and microsatellites. The development of the modular payload adapter will be done in partnership with OCCAM Space. The goal is to create the hardware to be as light as possible while also being as adaptable as possible to launch more satellites and meet market demands.
“PLD space has proven itself with its first launch last year, and we look forward to seeing the experience applied to the Miura 5 launch services development,” says ESA’s Jorgen Bru, “The payload adapter development engaged today was chosen to increase market competitiveness and ensure that many different types of satellites and customers can fly.”
This contract once again signals ESA’s shift from depending solely on its own launch company, Arianespace, to instead obtaining launch contracts from as many private, independent, and competing European companies as possible. Arianespace, for many reasons (some not its fault), failed to develop rockets capable of competing with SpaceX, and also failed to get them developed on time. ESA presently has no launch capability, and has had to sign contracts with SpaceX to get its payloads into orbit.
The shift is ground-shaking. It suggests that in the next two decades Europe should have a half dozen competing rocket companies of its own, all striving for business and thus all working hard to come up with ways to reduce launch costs. Under the Arianespace monopoly, little innovation took place, launch costs never dropped, and though for many years it controlled a majority of the launch market, it could never make a profit.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
And the thousand pound gorilla in the room is, “Will Arianespace be allowed to fail?”
“The shift is ground-shaking. It suggests that in the next two decades Europe should have a half dozen competing rocket companies of its own, all striving for business and thus all working hard to come up with ways to reduce launch costs. ”
Where will they get all the talent? And not just in rocket engineering, but in controlling costs and achieving competitiveness! Won’t the temptation to ask for and enjoy government subsidies be overwhelmingly seductive?
Ray Van Dune asked: “Where will they get all the talent? And not just in rocket engineering, but in controlling costs and achieving competitiveness! Won’t the temptation to ask for and enjoy government subsidies be overwhelmingly seductive?”
Some of the rocket talent must be developed, but Arianespace and its suppliers have a lot of experience to lead that effort. Europe has been a free market capitalist continent longer than America, so funding, cost control, and competition are not new, just relatively new in the rocketry world, a worldwide problem to solve.
For PLD, their Miura1 success shows that they have experience with suborbital sounding rockets, which can be scaled up to orbital rockets. As we saw with Starship, getting off the pad is an important step, and PLD accomplished an entire suborbital mission. They already have a good amount of talent. Miura5 is aiming for the more difficult but popular sun-synchronous orbits. This is an example of when an equatorial launch is less than optimal, because sun-synchronous orbits are somewhat retrograde (inclinations greater than 90˚), meaning that the “throw” of the Earth’s rotation is actually counterproductive for reaching those orbits.
The U.S. has several startups led by people from both Blue Origin and SpaceX, and I think that Europe can find the talent it needs from its own rocketry community. As with U.S. startups, there may be some time required for each new rocket to successfully reach orbit. The real problem is still in the bureaucracy.
A lesson already learned: don’t try launching from the U.K. They say that they want a launch industry, but their actions have spoken much louder.