On Sunday morning, Virgin Orbit became the third privately funded US missile company to reach orbit – and the only one to accomplish this feat from the air. The company’s liquid-fired rocket, called LauncherOne, came from under the wing of Cosmic girl, Virgin Orbit’s custom-built Boeing 747, off the coast of California. Cosmic girlThe pilot, Kelly Latimer, said goodbye to the rocket at about 9,000 meters – the cruising altitude of a typical passenger jet – and after a few seconds of freefall, LauncherOne fired its engines and propelled itself into space. Once in orbit, the rocket released its payload of 10 cubesats, built by researchers at NASA and several American universities, before falling back to Earth.
The successful launch was a welcome win for the Virgin team, which has suffered setbacks since its initial launch attempt last spring. That first test flight in May was cut short seconds after the missile was released due to a break in the powertrain. After engineers identified and resolved the problem, company officials planned a second launch in December, but decided to postpone it as Covid-19 cases spiked around their Los Angeles headquarters.
“We’ve done a tremendous amount to ensure the safety of the team, and so many of our launch operations and operations are virtual,” said Dan Hart, CEO of Virgin Orbit, on a phone call ahead of Sunday’s launch. “It’s really amazing to do it during a pandemic.”
Today’s launch marked the culmination of nearly a decade of engineering work at Virgin Orbit, one of two rocket companies founded by billionaire Richard Branson. In 2018, Virgin Orbit’s sister space company, Virgin Galactic, made history by launching a spacecraft that carried two people from beneath a modified plane, sending them to the edge of space. Branson clearly loves launching things from planes and has staffed both companies with engineers and pilots who make it look easy. Now the question is: can he turn it into a sustainable company?
Air launch is most commonly associated with rockets heading for targets on the Earth’s surface, but it also has a long history in the space industry. The first orbital air-launched rocket, known as Pegasus, was sent into orbit in the early 1990s by Orbital Sciences Corporation, which has since folded into Northrop Grumman. Like LauncherOne, Pegasus is capable of pushing about 1,000 pounds of payload into space, and the rocket falls from the belly of a hollowed-out passenger jet. But in the past 30 years, Pegasus has only completed 44 missions. To put that in perspective, SpaceX has flown more than twice as much in the past decade.
“When I started looking at feasibility studies and thinking about whether we should do this, Pegasus was the blinking neon sign that flashed in my vision 24/7,” Will Pomerantz, the vice president of special projects at Virgin Orbit, told WIRED ahead of time. . of the company’s first launch attempt last May. “Technologically, Pegasus is a huge success. But maybe not from a market perspective. “
Pomerantz says the reason Pegasus hasn’t attracted many customers is that those customers didn’t exist at launch. The commercial small satellite industry has exploded in recent years and now there are hundreds of companies looking for a cheap ride to space. Pegasus is still around, but launch costs have skyrocketed over the decades. In the 1990s, NASA paid $ 16 million for a Pegasus launch. Today it costs nearly $ 60 million. Even if we factor in inflation, those costs have nearly tripled and are beyond what most of these small satellite companies can afford. The air launch was once an idea well ahead of its time, but now Pomerantz believes it’s time.