PLD Space

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Welcome to our in-depth analysis of PLD Space, originally published January 9th 2023 and most recently updated October 7th, 2026 Updated content. Make sure to check out our mission statement and why we do what we do. Look at our New Space guide if you want explanations of terms and concepts used in our research. See MIURA 5 next to Europe’s other rockets in European rockets compared, and every first-launch date PLD Space has given, back to Arion 2, in European launch dates. And follow us on X for updates.

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🚀 Update from October 2026

• Still no orbit. MIURA 1 flew once, on 7 October 2023, to 46 km. The first MIURA 5 launch is now planned for the first half of 2027 from Kourou, after earlier targets of 2020, 2021, 2024, 2025 and 2026.
• Money. Spain’s government says it has put more than EUR 170 million into PLD, and ESA added a EUR 158.9 million launcher contract in August 2026. The EUR 288 million “Series C” includes EUR 61.7 million of notes sold in 2024 and 2025.
• Valuation. The January 2026 share price of EUR 1,094 implies about EUR 430 million after the round (our estimate), up from about EUR 95 million in November 2023.
• Accounts. 2025 sales were EUR 0.65 million against EUR 81 million of operating costs. Each year’s accounts moved the first commercial launch year, from 2019 to 2026, and never wrote down the development asset, now EUR 89 million.
• Audit. Deloitte qualified the 2019 accounts over an unbooked debt to shareholder GMV. EY has audited every year since, with clean opinions.
• Company. Now Payload Aerospace, S.A., Calle Marie Curie 23, Elche, with more than 500 employees (government figure, September 2026).

PLD Space – Spain’s rollercoaster NewSpace company

PLD Space is a Spanish NewSpace company building the MIURA rockets. Before we continue you should know: This company is an absolute rollercoaster.

PLD didn’t launch a single (research) rocket in its first 12 years of existence, yet it produced over 5,000 tweets, hours of PR footage, hired a Chinook helicopter for stunt-like drop-tests and convinced more than a dozen institutions into giving them millions and millions of Euros. Its annual accounts used a launch price of 8 million Euros for a 100 kg suborbital rocket to assess the book value of its assets. The team size has exploded, imploded, and exploded again, from 47 people in 2019 to 33 in 2020 and 351 on average in 2025, while Glassdoor reviewers scolded management and experienced engineers could expect around EUR 25,000 before taxes a year. Having exhausted professional investors, they targeted retail investors and launched a suborbital rocket to 46 km in 2023. Since then the Spanish state has become PLD’s largest funder, its largest shareholder at the end of 2025 and its first customer. Now, in its 15th year, they still find ways to get money, PR is still going strong while orbital rockets are… well, there’s something happening with rockets, too, we assume?

This is an absolute prime example of a Spanish telenovela (…yes, we know telenovelas are Latin American..) in real life: Entertaining, generally over the top and with not much substance. But it’s certainly fun to watch. Without further ado: PLD Space.

What you should know about PLD Space

PLD Space: Rocket Engineering Made in Spain

PLD Space was established in 2011 by two founders with the goal of providing the first commercial launch services for Spain, from Spain. PLD Space (officially “Payload Aerospace, S.A.”, a sociedad anónima or public limited company since 2024) is a special case for a NewSpace company. Not only are they developing a commercial rocket, they also planned to recover the first stage from the start of development.

Having said that, it is important to put PLD into context first. MIURA 1 was in development for 12 years before its single flight in 2023, and it was never an orbital rocket. It carried its payload to 46 km and fell back into the Atlantic (this is not really “spaceflight”, it’s having a glimpse at space).

PLD’s orbital rocket, the MIURA 5, can carry up to 540 kg to sun-synchronous orbit, and the company plans its first launch for the first half of 2027 from Kourou. Its first orbital rocket, then called Arion 2, was due in 2020. Among the companies ESA picked for its European Launcher Challenge, Isar Aerospace reached orbit on 5 September 2026, while PLD and Rocket Factory Augsburg have not.

PLD Space – A closer look at Payload Aerospace’s interesting history

Founding and early years (2011 – 2014)

PLD Space was founded in September 2011 by Raúl Torres and Raúl Verdú to develop launch services and industrial aerospace rockets. The company is based in a smaller city named Elche, in the south-eastern part of Spain. The founders wanted to build two rockets, the Arion 1 and Arion 2 rockets, which are still the basis for the current versions, the MIURA. In 2019, the founders had to rename their rockets because of their similarity to the “Ariane” rockets by ArianeSpace.

The first financing came early. In 2013 and 2014 the team received its first public loans from IVF (Institut Valencià de Finances – Valencian Finance Institute) and CDTI (Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial – Center for the Development of Industrial Technology), plus convertible debt from Caixa Capital Micro, about half a million Euros in total according to the 2016 accounts. They used the money to start developing their rocket propulsion systems starting with a small test stand at Teruel airport.

Generating first results and hype through marketing and PR (2015 – 2016)

Right from the start, development was progressing quickly. The team’s Marketing and PR game were also on point, as you can see in the video below from 2015, as well as dozens of other videos from the company.

Financial support improved through a EUR 285,000 share of the European Commission’s SMILE project from 2016, a EUR 1.16 million loan from CDTI for the TEPREL engine programme (Tecnología Española de Propulsión Reutilizable Espacial para Lanzadores – Spanish Reusable Space Propulsion Technology for Launchers) in September 2016, part of it non-repayable, and a EUR 750,000 contract from ESA’s LPSR programme in November 2016.

The plans in 2015 and 2016 under which the funds were raised were clear:

• Suborbital test flight of Arion 1 in March of 2018 with reuse of the first stage
• 5 missions were confirmed and letters of intent with a value of EUR 40 million were already signed
• The Arion 2, the orbital launcher, was supposed to fly in June 2020
• The cherry on top, a moon mission, was announced for 2023

New office, testing, infrastructure and launch sites (2017 – 2018)

At the end of 2016 the company still had fewer than 10 employees. In December 2016 and January 2017 it sold new shares for about EUR 1.65 million at EUR 118 per share, and its new shareholder GMV signed a contract to develop the rocket’s avionics for up to EUR 2.4 million, to be paid later. In June and September 2018 the Series A brought about EUR 8.7 million in cash at EUR 152 per share from investors such as the aeronautical company Aciturri and the Spanish fund JME Venture Capital, and PLD also won EUR 1.95 million from the European Commission’s SME Instrument.

With new funds secured and engine development seemingly going well, PLD Space moved into its new office in Elche Parque Industrial and began scaling operations, from 21 employees at the end of 2017 to 47 at the end of 2018.

In August 2018, PLD Space signed a 25-year agreement with the Teruel Airport Consortium to develop and use a 13,337 square meter space at the airport to test rocket technology. PLD Space would also invest EUR 1 million in infrastructure, including a control room, offices, access paths, a rocket engine maintenance hangar, and a test bench for the MIURA 1 (previously Arion 1) rocket.

In November of the same year, PLD Space reached an agreement with the Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacial (INTA) to launch the MIURA 1 from El Arenosillo, a launch facility on the southwest coast of Spain.

Engine failure and mass exodus at the company (2019 – 2020)

2019 seemingly started strong for PLD. The team went from 21 employees at the end of 2017 to 47 at the end of 2018. Finances looked stable, a brand new test site was finished and they began to sign commercial launch contracts with governmental (German Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM)) and commercial (TelespazioVEGA) providers for launches at the end of 2019.

But behind the scenes, things weren’t going so well. Growth was stagnating, even with dozens of open positions. The company kept postponing the launch of the Miura 1 with no clarifications. They rented a Chinook in April 2019 for their recovery drop test while their Twitter remained highly active and PR video after PR video after PR video was released. It seemed the management knew that the rocket was not ready and tried to postpone the ultimate failure by diverting the attention.

Then, in October 2019, they tested their engine and it blew up. A “series of test firing anomalies” set back PLD and delayed their launch again. The issues were more deep-set than was announced, and “due to certain engine problems detected during the year and problems with delays in the manufacture of the structure generated by the supplier to which it had been delegated”, any sort of launch was postponed indefinitely.

It took them around 5 months to figure out the issue, around 2 weeks before Covid hit Europe.

In these months, dozens of employees quit, including high ranking engineers such as the CTO and the Head of Propulsion. The accounts show 16 people let go in 2019 “debido al retraso del lanzamiento de Miura 1” (due to the delay of the MIURA 1 launch), a furlough scheme (ERTE) in 2020 and 13 more job cuts, and the careers-page at PLD was disabled. The future of PLD was very uncertain and time was running out.

The accounts for 2019 carry a second problem. In 2016 PLD had signed the avionics contract with its shareholder GMV, to be paid later, and by the end of 2018 it owed GMV EUR 1.76 million. When the 2019 accounts were drawn up in September 2020, after what they call an analysis of a possible pre-insolvency situation (“posible situación preconcursal”), PLD took that debt off its books. The auditor Deloitte qualified its opinion: PLD should have shown EUR 3.46 million more in debt and in development assets. The 2020 accounts came with a new auditor, EY, who restated 2019. In December 2020 PLD ended the GMV contract and agreed to pay GMV EUR 4 million, and that amount went onto the balance sheet as part of the development asset, so no loss was booked for it. By the end of 2021 PLD had paid GMV EUR 100,000 of it.

Recovery, targeting retail investors and… an actual launch (2021 – 2023)

What looked to be a dead-end somehow didn’t deter the founders, the funders or the Spanish government. PLD pulled through: shareholders put in EUR 1.4 million in 2020, and in October 2021 the Valencian finance institute IVF paid out a EUR 1.97 million subordinated loan. They used the time and intermediate financing to secure their biggest funding round to date, their Series B, with total funding of 13,660,000 Euro in cash equity at EUR 320 per share, 2,134,000 through “tax credit monetization operations”, a subordinated loan of 1,975,000 Euros from the government and more funding from the ESA, the EC and CDTI for a total of 716,000 Euros.

In terms of development, a launch of the MIURA 1 was set for 2022 and then again postponed to (January, May, June, September, October) 2023. On 7 October 2023 MIURA 1 lifted off from El Arenosillo and reached 46 km, against 80 km planned, and the rocket was lost at sea after splashdown. The company has since focused on the MIURA 5, of which both engines had to be developed pretty much from scratch.

Meanwhile, hiring has gone off like a rocket. The average headcount rose from 54 in 2021 to 105 in 2022, 127 in 2023, 195 in 2024 and 351 in 2025, and the government counted more than 500 employees in September 2026. Management announced 200 employees for 2022 and 300 for the end of 2024, and the accounts show about 110 and about 265 at those dates.

Public money, a Series C and a moving launch date (2024 – 2026)

In January 2024 CDTI, part of Spain’s science ministry, awarded PLD EUR 40.5 million under the PERTE Aeroespacial programme to deliver a MIURA 5 prototype by the end of 2025, with a first flight in 2025, commercial launches from 2026 and more than 30 launches a year by 2030. PLD repays the money through royalties, capped at the amount received over ten years, or CDTI can take a stake of up to 20% in the company. In July 2024 Santander, EBN and the state bank ICO lent PLD EUR 31.2 million, 80% guaranteed by the state export credit agency CESCE and repayable in one sum on 4 July 2026. ICO said at the time that the first MIURA 5 launch would come by the end of 2025.

The shareholders turned the company into a sociedad anónima on 20 June 2024 (registered in October), and it moved its seat to Calle Marie Curie 23 in Elche. ESA preselected PLD for its European Launcher Challenge on 7 July 2025, and Spain pledged EUR 169 million to it in November. On 27 August 2026 ESA signed a EUR 158.9 million contract that requires PLD to reach orbit by the end of 2027. PLD also signed for a second launch site at Etlaq Spaceport in Oman in February 2025. It is building its own pad at ELM-Diamant in Kourou, where it says it has invested EUR 35 million, and agreed with CNES on 1 October 2026 to study a second pad there.

The money grew in 2026. In January the shareholders converted EUR 61.7 million of notes sold in 2024 and 2025 into shares and issued new shares for EUR 119.6 million, which PLD announced in March as a EUR 180 million Series C led by Mitsubishi Electric and the state development finance company COFIDES with EUR 50 million each. The EIB lent EUR 30 million in April, and a EUR 108 million extension in September brought the round to EUR 288 million. The company now speaks of EUR 488 million of financing, a figure that adds equity, loans and contracts.

The launch date moved with the money. The 2025 accounts, signed on 27 March 2026, planned “dos lanzamientos previstos para el año 2026” (two launches planned for 2026). In the following months the company said mid-2026, then summer 2026, and on 10 September 2026, during a visit by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the first half of 2027.

PLD Space’s Rockets: MIURA 1, MIURA 5 and MIURA 9

The MIURA 1 is a single stage suborbital research rocket (or “sounding rocket”) with a maximum payload capacity of 4×25 kg and potential microgravity of up to 4 minutes. The regeneratively cooled TEPREL-1B engine is powered by KeroLOX (Kerosene and Liquid Oxygen) and produces 30kN of thrust at sea-level. It flew once, on 7 October 2023, and the rocket was lost at sea, so the recovery that was part of its design was never shown.

The MIURA 5 is a two-stage orbital rocket, about 35.7 m tall and 2 m wide, burning RP-1 kerosene and liquid oxygen. The first stage has five TEPREL-C engines with about 190 kN of sea-level thrust each, more than six times as powerful as the TEPREL-1B from the MIURA 1, and the second stage has one TEPREL-C vacuum engine (75 kN in company material, 50 kN in other sources). ESA gives its capacity as up to 540 kg to sun-synchronous orbit.

Going with this, the MIURA 5 is a much more advanced rocket than MIURA 1, with two new engines that differ in size and propellant flow rate from the MIURA 1 engine. It also seems to use a gas generator cycle. Going from a successful MIURA 1 flight to a MIURA 5 launch was always going to take several huge milestones.

In September 2026 PLD renamed its planned MIURA 5 upgrade to MIURA 9: about 42 m tall, 3 m wide, nine engines on the first stage and up to 1,500 kg to sun-synchronous orbit. The MIURA Next family and the LINCE crew capsule, announced in 2024 for the 2030s, are company plans with no hardware flown.

Launch costs and cost-revenue projections

Throughout the history, PLD has been relatively quiet about launch prices for its vehicles. Considering its massive reliance on PR and Marketing in its overall business strategy, this seems somewhat surprising. There are a few public announcements though, and in 2019 they claimed that for their MIURA 1 launch they were targeting roughly EUR 6 million in costs per launch. This comes around to EUR 60,000 per kilogram of suborbital payload.

In the same report, the MIURA 5 (back then still Arion 2) is targeted to have a price point of $ 38,000 per kg with a payload of 83 kilogram to sun synchronous orbit (SSO) projected for a 2021 launch. This is, of course, way off and considering the company’s track record, probably overly optimistic.

Now, going by the official, signed and notarized publication, which is their annual report 2020 and 2021, the company claims that a single MIURA 1 launch is worth 8 million (which they also use to assess the value of its assets internally). This leaves a price point of EUR 80,000 per kilogram of suborbital payload, a number that seems unrealistic. In their annual report 2022, the company set the price of MIURA 1 to 0 Euros. The MIURA 5 launches, with the first one then projected for 2025, were estimated to bring in revenues of 8.5 million Euros per launch, which comes out to around 15,000 to 20,000 EUR per kg of mass. The business plan in PLD’s 2024 management report, as reported by Merca2, expects 2 missions and EUR 32.8 million of revenue in 2026 and 32 missions and EUR 480.5 million in 2030, about EUR 11 – 16 million per mission.

A comparative overview of hypothetical (PLD) and real (Sounding Rockets, ArianeSpace, SpaceX) prices for orbital and suborbital launches:

Since there are no orbital launches yet, we looked at the managements’ projections to figure out their business model. There have been a few business plans in older pitch decks, however none of those have come anywhere close to being true. Let’s go through them, one by one. Here are the projections from 2018:

Here are the projections from the annual report published in April 2023. We’ve contrasted the numbers with their public information in their SEGO Finance crowdfunding offer. We found these numbers quite striking, as they were published around the same time, yet differ materially between what was in their annual report vs. what was in their offering to Spanish retail investors.

On this chart, the orange numbers indicate the retail investor offering, whereas the red indicates the numbers according to their annual report. As you can see, though published at almost the same time, the numbers differ quite a bit. The commercialization of MIURA 5 starts with 4 launches in 2025, whereas internal numbers project just a single launch in 2025.

Even more striking: In their timeline on SEGO venture, they announced the “Lanzamiento MIURA 5” – meaning the first launch of the MIURA 5 in 2024.

OK, we thought, so this must have been just a test launch, right?

While this seems like a valid explanation, what is not so clear is why PLD has projected full revenue of 9,6 million Euros for their MIURA 5 launch in their financial projection in the SEGO offer in 2024.

As the chart also shows, their revenue projections were a lot more optimistic in what they were selling retail investors, “successfully” for EUR 3.7 million from 293 investors.

In January 2024 the PERTE award repeated the plan: “During 2025, the focus will be on the qualification process and the maiden flight of the first MIURA 5 unit. The company expects to begin commercial operations in 2026 with the goal of exceeding 30 launches annually by 2030.” Neither the 2025 flight nor the 2026 commercial start happened.

None of the projections either make sense or are realistic, unfortunately, with a lot more uncovered, such as labor costs. For the annual report data, labor costs are actually decreasing (!!) in their launch ramp-up between 2026 to 2028, while the crowdfunding offer says labor-costs will go from 8,5 million to 15 million between 2023 and 2025, a time in which PLD supposedly more than doubles the number of employees yet decreases the average salary by…20%?

Compare this with their other numbers which project a maximum of 14 or 18 launches by 2030 respectively, starting with launches in 2024 and 2025 – both of which never happened.

What the annual accounts assumed, year after year

Spanish accounting rules let a company carry its development spending as an asset when technical success is well founded and commercial profit is reasonably assured, and the asset has to be tested every year against the cash it is expected to earn. PLD’s accounts state the assumptions behind that test, and the first commercial launch year in them moved every time the last one came close:

No year wrote the asset down. It grew from EUR 2 million to EUR 89 million, while PLD’s total sales from 2016 to 2025 came to EUR 5.4 million. In the last two years the revenue the accounts expected for 2027 fell from EUR 85 million to EUR 61.2 million, while the asset grew from EUR 50.9 million to EUR 89.2 million. Until 2023 the accounts discounted the expected cash at 3.54%, which they describe as PLD’s cost of borrowing, and the rate rose to 11.3% for 2024 and 23% for 2025. The 2023 accounts repeated the 2022 assumptions word for word, while the management report bound into the same filing already said MIURA 5 would fly in 2026.

The 2025 accounts were signed on 27 March 2026. They assumed commercial MIURA 5 launches in 2026 and EUR 61.2 million of sales in 2027, and their going-concern note planned two launches in 2026. Less than six months later the company moved the first launch to 2027. EY signed clean opinions on every set of accounts from 2020 to 2025, and each year named the capitalised development and the going-concern question as key audit matters.

The other reading: the rules allow a company to carry development as an asset, MIURA 1 did fly, the discount rate rose as the auditor kept flagging the risk, and ESA, the EIB and Mitsubishi Electric each checked the company before putting money in. What would change our view is a write-down in the 2026 accounts, a qualified opinion or a MIURA 5 launch in 2027.

Investing in PLD Space: Funding and Financials

PLD has gone from a small space startup founded by two engineers out of university to a company with the corporate structure of a bailed-out conglomerate (apart from the revenue). Investors include banks, the Spanish government, private individuals, “economic interest groups” (AIE – Agrupación de Interés Económico) and industry players. The board has 13 members (July 2026). Sales were EUR 1,660 in 2021, EUR 0.70 million in 2022, EUR 0.20 million in 2023, EUR 2.29 million in 2024 and EUR 0.65 million in 2025, mostly engineering services, studies and ESA contracts. Over the same years the company announced EUR 320 million of signed contracts (October 2023), EUR 470 million of reservations (March 2024), more than EUR 596 million of commercial interest (October 2024) and EUR 980 million of pre-commercial orders (October 2025). None of these figures has been audited, and none has turned into launch revenue.

The value of the assets has always been tied to hypothetical launch prices. In their annual reports 2020 and 2021, the management claims the MIURA 1 has an 8,000,000 Euro launch price per suborbital launch – which comes down to EUR 80,000 per kilogram for a suborbital flight, or more than 5 times what European NewSpace competitors charge for orbital flights.

How the losses stay small

PLD’s reported losses look small next to its spending because two items reduce them. Engineers’ work on the rockets is booked as income (“trabajos realizados por la empresa para su activo”, work done by the company for its own assets) and moved onto the balance sheet as development. And since 2020 PLD has sold its research tax credits to investors through AIE partnerships, which brought EUR 31 million of income from 2020 to 2025. The investors pay PLD cash and use its research tax credits to cut their own tax bills, and the credits are worth more to them than they paid. In 2025 operating costs were EUR 81 million, EUR 44.6 million of engineering work went onto the balance sheet, and the reported net loss was EUR 32.9 million.

Some of the tax-credit income was later written off, EUR 8.9 million in 2024 and EUR 2.8 million in 2025. Until PLD bought the partnership in December 2025, the MIURA 5 development asset legally belonged to it.

At the end of 2021 PLD had EUR 7.2 million of financial debt, almost all of it from public lenders such as IVF, Aragón’s Suma Teruel, CDTI and ENISA, against EUR 23.8 million of equity. By the end of 2025 debt had reached EUR 53 million, with EUR 39 million of bank debt due within the year, and working capital was minus EUR 58 million.

The funding PLD says it needs for the MIURA 5 has gone from EUR 25 million in the 2017 accounts to EUR 45 million in 2018 and 2019 and EUR 70 million in 2020 and 2021.

Paying shareholder GMV

GMV, an early shareholder, was owed EUR 4 million for avionics work after the 2020 settlement described above. In November 2023, the same month PLD sold new shares at EUR 439.66, it also bought back 7,716 of its own shares from GMV at EUR 755.71 each, EUR 5.8 million in total, 72% above the price new investors paid. The accounts give no reason for the price.

Overview of Funding Rounds, Valuation and Shareholders

The company was founded in September 2011 and has sold shares at rising prices. The 2023 round, which PLD called “Serie C1”, raised EUR 34.7 million at EUR 440 per share, including EUR 3.7 million from 293 retail investors through the SEGO Venture crowdfunding platform. This hail mary aimed at private individuals who, I would assume, had not read the history above, but relied on the publications of PLD as the “future of Spanish and European space”. In January 2026 the new shares cost EUR 1,094 each, and the notes from 2024 and 2025 converted at EUR 806.

In their February 2023 stock offering, they were projecting a 75 million Euro equity round needed in 2023. Instead, they received 40.5 million Euros from the Spanish government’s PERTE programme, which is paid back through royalties on launches or by giving CDTI a stake of up to 20%.

As of end of 2025, the company’s accounts and the register list the following shareholders, with their positions in 2017 and 2021 for reference. The January 2026 round, with Mitsubishi Electric and COFIDES at EUR 50 million each, came after these dates.

Public money in, promised vs delivered

The Spanish government says it has given PLD more than EUR 170 million “through investment, R&D aid and pre-commercial public procurement”, not counting ESA money. Here is what the main programmes paid and what they were promised:

Every programme on this list that named a launch date has seen it pass, and the largest public sums arrived from 2024 on, after targets of 2020, 2021 and 2024 had already gone by.

My opinion on PLD Space and why you should keep an eye on them

What I like about Payload Aerospace

• The PR: The company has over 5,000 tweets, the founder Torres over 11,800. There are dozens of PR videos and way more unlisted ones (see above). They chartered a Chinook helicopter to drop an empty vessel of a not-yet-developed-rocket from the sky, filmed it and almost hailed it as the second coming of Christ. They’ve developed their own private test stand on an airport and rented it for 25 years. There’s about 14 Spanish flags in every video. They have flight patches (and recovery patches) for things that don’t even exist yet. In short: if you’re ever in need of some light NewSpace entertainment, PLD is the place to look for. The amount of time they spent on marketing is incredible.
• First mover: The infrastructure they set up, the contracts and awareness in Spain is something that could be very helpful for other companies operating from the Iberian Peninsula. Many of the previous leading engineers and high level management of PLD that left in 2020 have gone on to found their own aerospace companies. PLD flew MIURA 1 in 2023, builds MIURA 5 hardware in Elche and brought Mitsubishi Electric in as an industrial shareholder.

What I don’t like about Payload Aerospace

• Misrepresentation: Balance sheets and financial statements are a record of a management’s competence and truthfulness. PLD’s management, over a decade, has proven deficient in both. Nine sets of accounts assumed a first commercial launch year that never arrived, and the 2019 accounts carried a qualified audit opinion. The 2023 going-concern note reported positive working capital where the balance sheet shows a negative figure.
• Misrepresentation II: Soliciting funds from private individuals heightens a company’s duty to be truthful. Yet, PLD’s public claims starkly contrasted with their internal data, misleadingly enticing EUR 3.7 million from unsuspecting Spanish citizens. Let me leave you with an excerpt from their investor prospectus, laden with potential and conditional “investment gain of up to x8”: “[…] a company like PLD Space, once it has demonstrated its technological leadership with the MIURA 1 flight, is expected to multiply its current valuation by a range of x2 – x3. The estimated profitability of this investment for the next 3-5 years is as follows: Total or partial acquisition of partners’ stakes in an M&A process or funding round with secondary offerings: between X3 and X5 return on the investment made in this investment round. This event could occur from the MIURA 1 launch (March 2023) up to 2025. Listing on the stock market: approximately X8 return on the investment made in this investment round prior to its potential IPO between 2026 and 2027.”
• The PR: For the same reasons as above. Anything that is publicized is basically a PR show.
• No-fly-zone: We wrote in 2023 that there was no realistic scenario in which the MIURA 5 would fly before 2025. It did not fly in 2025. The company has since moved the date to 2026 and then to the first half of 2027, about seven years after the orbital rocket was first due.
• Public money without a stop: The Spanish state is PLD’s largest funder, a top shareholder and its first customer at the same time. The largest public sums came after missed dates, and the terms we can see (royalties, an optional stake, an 80% state guarantee on the bank loan) leave most of the risk with the taxpayer.
• Paying a shareholder: EUR 4 million to GMV for avionics, booked as an asset, and EUR 5.8 million to buy back GMV’s shares at 72% above the price new investors paid the same month.

Things to watch out for

• Raúl Torres, the co-founder and CEO: This guy has led the company for 15 years, hasn’t met any of the launch dates they set out, still claims they’re the “European launch leader”, somehow keeps finding ways to move the goal posts, raises money and finds fresh employees to work for him. Since 2021 the board has been chaired by Binomio Ventures, represented by Ezequiel Sánchez, who presents himself as executive president.
• Actual Launches: That’s basically it. It was good to see MIURA 1 taking off from the pad in 2023, though it didn’t make its planned apogee, and 46 km is at least something. ESA’s contract requires orbit by the end of 2027. I previously stated that if MIURA 1 is successful, I’d expect two or three years of follow-up PR until any sort of MIURA 5 launch comes closer, which seems accurate.
• The 2026 accounts: Due in 2027. Watch whether the EUR 89 million development asset is written down, whether the state-guaranteed loan due in July 2026 was repaid, and whether the audit opinion stays clean.

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PLD Space: Jobs and career

The company is based in Elche, Spain. Generally, salaries in Spain are lower than in central or northern Europe, so any applicants should not expect to earn as much as in Germany, France or the UK. Fluent knowledge of Spanish is also required.

The salary ranges that are public and can be gathered from Glassdoor or public job ads from the company generally range from EUR 25,000 to EUR 35,000 for engineers and EUR 15,000 to EUR 25,000 for people in business administration (2023). The 2025 accounts show staff costs of EUR 21.7 million for 351 employees on average, about EUR 62,000 per head including social security.

In terms of working conditions, the team was basically reset in 2020 when most of the engineering team, including the CTO and the head of propulsion, left the company. Company reviews showed bad working conditions, lack of structure and strategy and low salary. 75% of all 5-star company reviews on Glassdoor came within a single week in May 2022. In the same year, there has been a massive uptick in hiring, with the team doubling to about 110 employees while management announced plans to go as high as “200 employees by end of year 2022” (which they didn’t). By September 2026 the government counted more than 500 employees.

Structured company information on PLD Space (Payload Aerospace, S.A.)

Updates on PLD Space

With our larger update from August 2023, we have included the results from the crowdfunding rounds, the update launch schedules as well as the failures of the MIURA 1. We’ve also added our “updated” opinion on the company. Most significantly, we’ve updated the pricing for the MIURA 5 at around EUR 20.000 per kg.

Update February 2024: We’ve updated the overall article to reflect the MIURA 1 launch and the new focus on the MIURA 5. We’ve taken a closer look at the company’s financial report and their crowdfunding publication, as well as their new funding announcement through the PERTE program. Employee charts, revenue and launch projections have been updated as well.

Update October 2026: We’ve added PLD’s annual accounts from 2016 to 2025, the assumptions behind every year’s asset test, the 2019 audit qualification and the payments to GMV, a table of public money against what it was promised, the Series C, the ESA launcher contract and the new MIURA 5 launch date, an estimate of the value after the January 2026 round, and new charts on headcount, costs, value and promised launch dates. See also our 2026 Update on PLD Space. Our March 2024 update is below.

March 2024 update

This was a separate post from 4 March 2024. We moved it here in October 2026 and kept the facts as they stood then.

In March 2024 an ESA activity page (2023, now offline) gave MIURA 5 a launch price of EUR 8.5 million for up to 540 kg. PLD said the first MIURA 5 launch would come in 2025 at the earliest and the first commercial launch in 2026. It had 160 staff and planned 300 by the end of 2024, and had just won EUR 40.5 million in PERTE funding from the Spanish government.

Retail investors on SEGO Finance were told in early 2023 that the first MIURA 5 launch would come in 2024, and were shown 4 launches by 2025, then 6 and 10 in the next two years. The balance sheet published eight weeks later planned 1 launch in 2025, then 6 and 8: about EUR 40 million less revenue. The 2024 test launch was booked as EUR 9.6 million of “MIURA 5 launches”. Less than a year later, the PERTE announcement moved the first commercial launch to 2026 and raised the 2030 target from 16 (SEGO) or 18 (balance sheet) to 30 launches a year.

If you find incorrect information or want to know more about our sources, feel free to contact us on X or via Email.

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