Virgin Orbit launches a rocket on a 747

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Virgin Orbit’s 747, nicknamed Cosmic Girl, took off from California around 10:30 a.m. PT with the rocket, called LauncherOne, tucked under the left wing of the plane. The aircraft flew over the Pacific Ocean before the rocket was released, freeing LauncherOne and allowing it to ignite its rocket engine and propel itself at over 17,000 miles per hour, quickly enough to begin orbiting the Earth.

“Literally and figuratively, this is way beyond what we achieved in our first launch demo,” the company posted on his Twitter account.

The rocket flew a group of small satellites on behalf of NASA’s Educational Nanosatellite Launch Program, or ELaNa, which allows high school and college students to design and assemble small satellites that NASA then pays to launch into space. The nine small satellites Virgin Orbit flew on Sunday included a University of Colorado Boulder temperature monitoring satellite, a satellite that will study how tiny particles collide in space from the University of Florida plant, and an experimental radiation detection satellite at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

About four hours after takeoff on Saturday, Virgin Orbit confirmed in a tweet that all of the satellites had been “successfully deployed to our target orbit.”

The successful mission makes Virgin Orbit the third so-called “New Space” company – startups wishing to overhaul traditional industry with innovative technologies – to reach orbit, after SpaceX and Rocket Lab. The success also paves the way for Virgin Orbit to begin launching satellites for a host of customers it has already lined up, including NASA, military and private companies that use satellites for commercial purposes.

Virgin Orbit broke away from Virgin Galactic, a company specializing in suborbital human spaceflight, in 2017. Virgin Orbit performed several “drop tests” of its LauncherOne rocket, which involved flying the vehicle over the Pacific Ocean. and let it dive into the ocean to control the 747’s release mechanism. Virgin Orbit’s first attempt to put a rocket into orbit came last May, when LauncherOne malfunctioned shortly after its release and the flight was interrupted. This failure was not unexpected.

“Launching from Earth to space is incredibly difficult,” the company said after the 2020 launch attempt.

Virgin Orbit had expected to attempt a second orbital launch attempt in late 2020, but the company was forced to postpone after “a few” of its employees tested positive for Covid-19, according to an email from the company. This has left many employees potentially exposed to the virus and in preventive quarantine, the company said.
Virgin Galactic unexpectedly abandons space plane test flight

“We are grateful and fortunate that most of our teammates have since eliminated their preventive quarantines, which allowed us to proceed with pre-launch operations,” the company said on Dec. 31, “although with measures still to be taken. more extreme in place to protect the health and safety of our team. “

Virgin Orbit, like other space technology companies in the United States, is allowed to continue operating throughout the pandemic because the government has deemed the space sector to be part of the country’s “critical infrastructure” in March. As one industry group argued, the industry’s business activity is also tied to critical U.S. national security projects and NASA programs.



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