PLD Space Brand Guidelines: Elche’s Miura Rockets, From El Arenosillo to Kourou

Three founders and an engine test stand at Teruel.

PLD Space was founded in 2011 in Elche, in the Spanish province of Alicante. Its legal name is Payload Aerospace S.L., and Spanish Wikipedia names its founders as Raúl Torres, Raúl Verdú and José Enrique Martínez. Speaking to the magazine Atalayar in October 2023, Verdú described himself as a co-founder of the company in 2011 together with Torres; at that time Torres was director of launches, Verdú director of business development and Ezequiel Sánchez executive president.

The company began with engines. Spanish Wikipedia says that in 2012 the state technology agency CDTI funded work on TEPREL, a reusable liquid-fuelled rocket engine, together with facilities to test it. From 2014 PLD Space ran its own test stand at Teruel Airport in Aragon, and on 1 July 2015 it fired its liquid engine there for the first time — the first test of a liquid rocket engine in Spain, according to both English and Spanish Wikipedia.

In August 2017 the headquarters moved to the Elche Industrial Park, where Miura 1 was manufactured and assembled, Wikipedia says. Agreements followed with Spain’s national aerospace institute INTA in November 2018, to launch from its El Arenosillo range in Huelva, and in July 2019 with the French space agency CNES, to study launching the larger rocket from the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou. Spanish Wikipedia gives a team of more than 190 people, with technical sites in Teruel, Huelva and French Guiana alongside the Elche headquarters.

Miura 1 in 2023, Miura 5 next.

The company’s rockets carry the name Miura. The first, Miura 1, is a single-stage suborbital rocket powered by a TEPREL-B engine of PLD Space’s own design; English Wikipedia describes it as both a research rocket for microgravity and upper-atmosphere work and a technology demonstrator for the orbital launcher. It was designed from the start to be recoverable.

Miura 1 flew on 7 October 2023 from El Arenosillo in south-western Spain. Reporting on 20 October 2023, Reuters described it as the first fully private European rocket launch. The company called the flight a “complete success”, Reuters said, although the rocket could not be recovered after it fell into the sea; recovery had not been a primary goal of the test. PLD Space said it had identified about a thousand points to improve for its next vehicle.

That vehicle is Miura 5, a two-stage orbital launcher for small satellites. English Wikipedia gives it a length of 35.7 metres and five TEPREL-C engines. It is to fly from the company’s own pad at Kourou: in October 2023 Verdú told Atalayar it would be a launch pad “we are not going to share with any other launch vehicle”, and Torres told Reuters the company was aiming for a first launch from French Guiana in the first quarter of 2026.

English Wikipedia also lists two longer-term projects: Miura Next, a planned family of larger, partially reusable launchers, and Lince, a capsule for cargo and crew.

How launch companies present themselves.

Launch companies sell something few customers ever see up close, so their public image is built almost entirely from pictures and broadcasts. The familiar set is a rocket standing on its pad at dawn or under floodlights, the long-exposure streak of an ascent across a night sky, and the plume photographed from miles down the coast. Engine test stands supply a second genre: a horizontal or downward jet of fire, usually shot from a safe distance, which stands in for years of engineering that is otherwise invisible.

Factories are shown the other way round. Clean white halls, rows of tank sections, workers in coveralls and cleanroom suits suggest order and repetition rather than drama. Many launches are also accompanied by a mission patch, a small embroidered emblem in the tradition of NASA crew patches, which turns a single flight into something that can be collected and worn.

The countdown livestream has become a format in its own right, with hosts, telemetry overlays and replays of the booster or upper stage. Not every company has worked this way: in April 2016 Inverse described one maker that gave a day’s notice of its flights and published an edited highlights video afterwards, with no live webcast. Coverage now often runs alongside posts from executives on social media, which journalists quote in their reports.

The industry also meets in person. The Space Symposium in Colorado Springs and the International Astronautical Congress, which moves to a different host city each year, are where companies unveil models, sign agreements and show their identities on stands and banners. This guide looks at what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it, what it has flown, and what it says about itself.

Qualification, a Kourou pad and European backing.

Work on Miura 5 continued through 2026. On its own news page, PLD Space reported in January 2026 on a second qualification model of the rocket and on construction of its Kourou launch pad, and in July 2026 on qualification of the tank pressurisation system, with full-stage testing named as the next step. In September 2026 Electronics Weekly reported that, according to the company, the rocket was on track for its first test flight in 2026, and that PLD Space aims eventually to fly up to 30 missions a year from several spaceports, including the Guiana Space Centre.

European institutions have backed the programme. In July 2025 the European Space Agency preselected PLD Space, with Isar Aerospace, Rocket Factory Augsburg, MaiaSpace and Orbex, for the next phase of its European Launcher Challenge, European Spaceflight reported on 7 July 2025. Electronics Weekly reported in September 2026 that ESA had announced a launch-services contract with PLD Space the month before, funded mainly by Spain with a contribution from Germany; that the European Investment Bank had backed Miura 5 in April 2026; and that the company had extended its Series C funding round, first opened in March 2026, to support production, test capacity, launch infrastructure and the move to commercial operations.

The company remains based in Elche, with its engine testing at Teruel. Its public story is told in steps: an engine fired in Aragon in 2015, a suborbital flight from Huelva in 2023, and an orbital rocket built for a pad of its own in French Guiana.

For a design guide, PLD Space shows a launch company that presents itself through a single rocket family, numbered by size, and a sequence of test sites across Spain and French Guiana. Compare Arianespace, whose Ariane rockets fly from the same base at Kourou, and Isar Aerospace, preselected alongside PLD Space for the European Launcher Challenge. For this guide we use a terracotta, a dark ink, a limestone and an Atlantic blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep PLD Space’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.