Virgin Orbit engineers remain upbeat, despite rocket launch failure
Virgin Orbit's attempt to launch a rocket from the wing of a Boeing 747 off the coast of southern California on Monday may not have been successful, but for the company's tech team, it provided a mine of information which will propel the company towards a competitive future.
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The 21 metre rocket, known as LauncherOne, was attached to the wing of a Virgin 747 jet called 'Cosmic Girl', especially fitted-out for the mission.
It took off on Monday from a runway in California's Mojave Desert, with a flight plan over the Pacific Ocean of just under an hour.
The rocket was dropped by the plane from an altitude of 10,000 metres, at which point it was due to ignite, take off and place a test satellite into orbit.
However, the engine shut down a "handful of seconds" later, causing the launch to fail.
“We’ve confirmed a clean release from the aircraft. However, the mission terminated shortly into the flight. Cosmic Girl and our flight crew are safe and returning to base,” Virgin Orbit said in its official Twitter commentary on the launch.
CEO Dan Hart on today's mission: “Our team performed their pre-launch & flight operations with incredible skill today. Test flights are instrumented to yield data and we now have a treasure trove of that... we took a big step forward today." Read more ↓ https://t.co/XxZV72aPDT
— Virgin Orbit (@Virgin_Orbit) May 25, 2020
Virgin Orbit, a branch of the Virgin group, founded in 2012 by British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, has not interpreted the aborted launch as a failure, the opposite in fact.
CEO Dan Hart said prior to the event that achieving orbit on a first launch would be difficult, noting that, based on historical records, only about 50 percent of first launches of new vehicles are successful.
"What we did today is really demonstrated the challenging aspects of air launch," he told Space News.
"Even though it was not as long a flight as we’d liked, we did burn down quite a lot of the risks associated with flying, and learned a lot about how the vehicle behaves."
Hart said that engineers will spend the coming weeks reviewing the data from the attempted launch.
The results may lead to additional testing of the next rocket or other changes.
He said that the second LauncherOne rocket is nearing completion at the company’s factory, with several more in various stages of production.
Here's our next rocket, built and ready for system-level testing in our final integration area as it waits for its turn to fly to space. pic.twitter.com/Zhc2uDtMMC
— Virgin Orbit (@Virgin_Orbit) May 25, 2020
The company is looking to develop its capacity to serve government and commercial clients in the field of small satellites (300-500 kilos), a market that is quickly expanding.
Unlike the usual vertical launches of rockets which require a special take off zone, the new method of transporting the rocket with a jumbo jet means it can take off from virtually any airport in the world.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk wrote a message to the Virgin team on Twitter, saying "Orbit is hard. Took us four attempts with Falcon 1," referring to his rocket launches into space. His latest attempt will take place next week in Florida, as he attempts to launch two astronauts into space aboard the Crew Dragon space shuttle.
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