Virgin Orbit launches missile from a 747 aircraft

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

“In both a literal and a figurative sense, this is miles ahead of what we achieved in our first launch demo,” the company said. Posted on his Twitter account.

The rocket flew with a group of small satellites on behalf of NASA’s Educational Launch of Nanosatellites, or ELaNa, program, 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 that Virgin Orbit flew on Sunday included a temperature monitoring satellite from the University of Colorado at Boulder, a satellite that will study how small particles collide in space from the University of Central Florida, and an experimental satellite for radiation detection from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

About four hours after takeoff on Saturday, Virgin Orbit confirmed in a tweet that all satellites have “successfully deployed into our target orbit.”

The successful mission makes Virgin Orbit only the third so-called “New Space” company – startups looking to reshape traditional industry with innovative technologies – to reach orbit, after SpaceX and Rocket Lab. The success also paves the way for Virgin Orbit to launch satellites for a large number of clients it has already deployed, including NASA, the military and private companies that use satellites for commercial purposes.

Virgin Orbit was formed in 2017 from Virgin Galactic, a company dedicated to suborbital manned space flights. Virgin Orbit conducted several ‘drop tests’ with its LauncherOne rocket, flying the vehicle over the Pacific Ocean and plunging it into the ocean to visit a vet using the 747’s unlocking mechanism. Virgin Orbit’s first attempt to launching a rocket into orbit came last May, when LauncherOne malfunctioned shortly after release and the flight was cut short. That failure was not unexpected.

“Launching from Earth to space is mind-bogglingly difficult,” the company said after its launch attempt in 2020.

Virgin Orbit had expected to attempt a second orbital launch attempt in late 2020, but the company had to postpone it after “a few” of its employees tested positive for Covid-19, according to an email from the company. That left many workers potentially exposed to the virus and put under preventive quarantine, the company said.
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“We are grateful and fortunate that most of our teammates have since cleared their preventive quarantines, allowing us to continue with pre-launch operations,” the company said on Dec. 31, “albeit with even more extreme health protection measures. and safety of our team. “

Virgin Orbit, like other space technology companies in the United States, has been allowed to continue operations during the pandemic, because in March the government considered the space sector part of the country’s “critical infrastructure”. As one industry group argued, the industry’s commercial activity is also intertwined with pivotal U.S. national security projects and NASA programs.

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