Virgin Orbit’s First Orbital Test Flight Fails
Virgin Orbit’s air-launched LauncherOne rocket failed to reach orbit today. Dropped from its Cosmic Girl 747 carrier aircraft over the Pacific Ocean, something went wrong with the rocket’s first stage. The company will investigate the problem and vows to move forward with another attempt “ASAP.”
Virgin Orbit, part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, is developing a small launch vehicle to deliver small satellites (300-500 kilograms) to Earth orbit. Small satellites have become very popular in recent years across all three sectors of the space business — civil, commercial, and national security — and quite a few companies are chasing that market.
LauncherOne is an air-launched design, so can fly from a wide variety of sites around the world instead of a fixed launch pad.
For the test today, Cosmic Girl took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port, CA and flew out over the Pacific Ocean.
The company live-tweeted events as they unfolded.
Here’s a quick shot from takeoff. pic.twitter.com/7nt1u58ogs
— Virgin Orbit (@Virgin_Orbit) May 25, 2020
Commencing final checks for the Terminal Count Autosequence. Once triggered, LauncherOne’s computers will take full control of the system in the minutes leading up to final countdown and release.
— Virgin Orbit (@Virgin_Orbit) May 25, 2020
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 (@Virgin_Orbit) May 25, 2020
Cosmic Girl has landed back in Mojave and our crew are all safe and sound.
— Virgin Orbit (@Virgin_Orbit) May 25, 2020
LauncherOne maintained stability after release, and we ignited our first stage engine, NewtonThree. An anomaly then occurred early in first stage flight. We’ll learn more as our engineers analyze the mountain of data we collected today.
— Virgin Orbit (@Virgin_Orbit) May 25, 2020
As we said before the flight, our goals today were to work through the process of conducting a launch, learn as much as we could, and achieve ignition. We hoped we could have done more, but we accomplished those key objectives today.
— Virgin Orbit (@Virgin_Orbit) May 25, 2020
The team’s already hard at work digging into the data, and we’re eager to hop into our next big test ASAP. Thankfully, instead of waiting until after our 1st flight to tackle our 2nd rocket, we’ve already completed a ton of work to get us back in the air and keep moving forward.
— Virgin Orbit (@Virgin_Orbit) May 25, 2020
Elon Musk of SpaceX and Peter Beck of RocketLab, both competitors for launching these types of satellites, tweeted words of encouragement.
Sorry to hear that. Orbit is hard. Took us four attempts with Falcon 1.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 25, 2020
Launch is super hard, the team should be really proud of today’s attempt. Glad the crew is home safe.
— Peter Beck (@Peter_J_Beck) May 25, 2020
On May 27 (Eastern Daylight Time), Virgin Orbit tweeted a video of the test showing the failure.
We said the main product of this flight would be data, and wow, did we get a lot of it! After diving into our early analyses, we wanted to share more about the flight — including both the many things that went well and what we know about the areas where we’ll need to improve. pic.twitter.com/g9Wi1d33bK
— Virgin Orbit (@Virgin_Orbit) May 27, 2020
This article was updated with the last tweet.
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