How PLD Space is building Europe’s commercial rocket future

In 2011, three aerospace engineers in Spain had a bold idea: build a family of reusable rockets that could offer sustainable, cost-effective access to space. It sounded like the kind of ambition that fills university whiteboards. More than a decade later, PLD Space has more than 450 engineers and specialists, a successful launch behind it, and a commercial launch vehicle on the pad.

In 2023, the company became the first private European company to successfully launch a rocket of its class with MIURA 1, a milestone that marked not just PLD Space’s maturity but a meaningful shift in Europe’s commercial space sector. Now the focus is MIURA 5, a dedicated launch vehicle designed to carry payloads of up to 1,000 kilograms to orbit for customers worldwide.

“What started as a university project has grown into a company of more than 450 engineers and specialists working across design, testing, manufacturing, and launch operations,” says Pablo Gallego, Senior Vice President at PLD Space.

In rocketry, there are no do-overs. After a launch vehicle leaves the pad, every subsystem, every separation event, every engine ignition has to work as expected. The margin for error disappears the instant ignition begins.

This reality shapes PLD Space’s entire test strategy, which Gallego describes as “test like you fly.” Every subsystem is pushed to its limits under real flight conditions, across structural components, propulsion systems, mechanical separation systems, and all launch-critical subsystems. The goal is not to verify that things work under ideal conditions. It is to verify that they hold together when conditions are anything but ideal.

At PLD Space’s test facilities in Teruel, Spain, multiple test benches run this validation work continuously. They measure stress, vibration, and performance during engine ignition and structural testing, capturing everything that happens in real time.

Running that level of validation infrastructure requires test systems that can handle complexity without adding it. PLD Space selected NI CompactRIO, PXI, and LabVIEW as the core of its ground testing infrastructure, a combination that Gallego describes as the “brain” of the operation.

“We initially chose CompactRIO because it is rugged, and we can use the real-time OS and the FPGA to control the test benches and simultaneously do the data logging in a single system,” says Gallego. For test benches with additional requirements, PXI took on the same dual role. The result is a consistent platform across different hardware configurations, collecting data from strain gages, pressure sensors, temperature sensors, and more, all feeding directly into the engineering workflow.

The ability to iterate quickly between testing and engineering teams is not a convenience. It is a competitive advantage. When a component behaves unexpectedly, the time between that observation and a redesigned component back on the test bench is a direct function of how fast data can move from acquisition to analysis to insight. For a company racing to compete in the commercial launch market, that speed matters enormously.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of how well the platform fits PLD Space’s growth is the trajectory of the test infrastructure itself. What started as a single CompactRIO system has grown to 11 test rigs, supported by a dedicated team of LabVIEW developers building automated test capabilities.

That growth did not require rebuilding the foundation. It required extending it, adding systems, adding channels, and adapting test procedures as the rocket design evolved, all without dismantling what was already working.

“When the rocket design changes, as it inevitably does, we can adapt the test systems without rebuilding everything from scratch,” says Gallego. “This approach has allowed PLD Space to scale our testing infrastructure as the company grows.”

Technology infrastructure is only part of PLD Space’s growth story. The other part is people. Through its Ad Astra program, PLD Space actively recruits young engineers and trains them in the technologies they use, including LabVIEW, turning student projects into real testing tools that run in production facilities.

It is an investment that reflects a clear-eyed view of what the space industry actually needs to grow. “If we want the space industry to grow, we have to invest in the engineers who will build its future,” says Gallego.

The same logic applies to artificial intelligence. As thousands of data points are generated across every simulation, test campaign, and flight, AI offers the potential to compress the analysis timeline from days or weeks to hours—not as a replacement for engineering judgment, but as a tool that supports better decisions and helps engineers focus on the hard problems that no algorithm can yet solve.

For PLD Space, the path to commercial spaceflight runs through rigorous validation, flexible infrastructure, and engineers who know how to use both. The rockets will fly because the testing is sound. And the testing is sound because the platform was built to grow with the mission.