At 20.56 hours (Spanish peninsular time) last Friday, August 16, the nine engines of the imposing Falcon 9, the rocket manufactured by the company Space X, founded by Elon Musk, roared again to propel its 90-meter structure and send into space the first satellite, the LUR-1, designed and manufactured entirely in the Basque Country by AVS, one of Robotekin’s partner companies.
Less than 24 hours after its launch, the company from Alava managed to establish the first contact. Minutes before 22.00 hours, the rocket reached the planned altitude (515 kilometers above the Earth), deployed as scheduled (1h. and 20 min. after liftoff) and entered nominal orbit at a speed of 7 kilometers per second, which allowed it to complete its first lap around the Earth in just 90 minutes.
Just a few hours later, on Saturday, August 17, at 12:42 p.m., when LUR-1 passed over the Basque Country, the expected signal contact was made between the satellite and the AVS headquarters in the Alava Technology Park, thus fulfilling the first major milestone in the company’s space career after four years of intense scientific and technological development.
From the command center of the Vanderberg Space Base (California), where the launch took place, Miguel Ángel Carrera, CEO of the company, valued the impact of this technological milestone both for the Basque company itself and for the Basque Country. “It is an extraordinary qualitative leap for AVS and also for the Basque aerospace sector. If up to now we had worked as a supplier of systems or critical components for large space missions, with the launch of the LUR-1 we have managed to lead a complete mission. That is to say, now we devise the project, manufacture and test it, and, in addition, once launched into space, we also control it from Earth, receiving the data sent by the satellite to process them”, Carrera pointed out.
LUR-1 has been conceived as a 57 kg microsatellite, the first of the LUR family of platforms, to capture high definition images of the Earth, although, in principle, the focus of the mission is on the geography of the Basque Country, to contemplate the evolution of the coastline, analyze pest and river controls or manage the distribution of crops, among others.
More than 1,000 working days of intense scientific and space innovation and 8 million euros, 40% of which came from public funds, were invested in its design and manufacture. The satellite has been designed to have a useful life of five years. Once this period has expired, it will be captured from its space orbit for subsequent re-entry into the atmosphere, where it will disintegrate.
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