Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit was last night unsuccessful in its maiden attempt to launch a rocket into space from the back of a jumbo jet. The attempt, which took place at 36,000ft above the Pacific Ocean, was “terminated shortly into the flight”, after technical issues.
Virgin Orbit is the sister company of Virgin Galactic, the company that hopes to provide passengers with ‘space tourism’ flights to the edge of outer space. Virgin Orbit, meanwhile, is entering the market for launching small satellites into near orbit and is competing with rivals such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin.
Last night’s aborted mission was the first attempt by anyone to launch a liquid-fuelled rocket into space from altitude. Until now, liquid-fuelled rockets have always been sent into orbit from launch pads but managing to do so from a high altitude will, if successful, be significantly cheaper due to savings on fuel and launch equipment.
Ahead of the failed maiden mission, Virgin Orbit had announced that it was “more ready than ever”, to conduct a test mission. In the end, however, it proved not to be quite ready enough. The chances of success at the first attempt were always moderate and the company had made an effort to temper expectations. A statement released ahead of the test flight cautioned “for the governments and companies who have preceded us in developing spaceflight systems, maiden flights have statistically ended in failure about half of the time”.
Virgin Orbit president Will Pomerantz has also warned “history is not terribly kind necessarily to maiden flights”.
That caution proved to be well founded. The Boeing 747-400 aircraft carrier that flew the rocket to 36,000ft, a decommissioned Virgin Atlantic aircraft, renamed Cosmic Girl, took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California before travelling to the planned drop zone 50 miles south of southern California’s Channel Islands. The aircraft carried the 70ft Launcher One rocket under its left wing.
The rocket was released from its holdings to drop into freefall, at which point it was to fire its engines and launch towards space, carrying a dummy payload into orbit. But three minutes after the rocket had been dropped from the jet, Virgin Orbit confirmed the attempt had been terminated.
Launcher One rockets can carry small payloads weighing up to 1100lb, 500kg, into low orbit. Payloads would typically be expected to be research or communications satellites. Rockets the burn solid fuel, specifically Northrop Grunman’s Pegasus rocket, have been taking payloads into orbit using air-launches since the 1990s.
However, the cost of sending a Pegasus into orbit is around $40 million (£32 million. Virgin Orbit plans to offer air-launches of liquid-fuelled Launcher One rockets for as little as $12 million (£9.8 million). It is even planned to allow multiple clients to share the cost of a single launch, drastically reducing the cost of getting small satellites into orbit.
Once the air-launch system has been perfected, Virgin Orbit plans to establish bases at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, Andersen US Air Force Base in Guam and other international locations, including the UK.