Small satellite launcher Virgin Orbit fails to launch rocket to space during first test flight

[Karlston]

Small satellite launcher Virgin Orbit fails to launch rocket to space during first test flight

The rocket fell from the plane and then some kind of issue occurred

Virgin Orbit’s 747 Cosmic Girl and rocket LauncherOne

Image: Virgin Orbit

Update May 25th, 5:20PM ET: Virgin Orbit’s test flight ended in failure shortly after LauncherOne dropped from under the company’s carrier 747 airplane. Virgin Orbit confirmed that the drop was successful and that the rocket’s main engine ignited. But then it quickly suffered some kind of anomaly at the beginning of the flight. The company says no one was hurt during the test and the team will be digging into the data to learn what went wrong.

 

Original Story: Small satellite launcher Virgin Orbit — the sibling company to Richard Branson’s space tourism venture Virgin Galactic — plans to conduct the first test launch of its rocket today. The company has been developing and testing its vehicles for the last six years, but now it’s ready to finally send a rocket to orbit.

 

Virgin Orbit’s primary rocket is called LauncherOne, capable of launching small to medium payloads, roughly the size of washing machines, to space. And the rocket takes a unique path to get there. Rather than launching upright from the ground — as the majority of rockets do these days — LauncherOne actually takes off from underneath the wing of a Boeing 747 airplane. Nicknamed Cosmic Girl, the 747 is designed to carry LauncherOne up to 35,000 feet. There, the plane pulls up, angling the rocket toward the sky, and then LauncherOne drops away. Its main engine ignites, propelling LauncherOne the rest of the way to orbit.

 

“We’re a very unique system in that we are air launched,” Dan Hart, the CEO of Virgin Orbit, said during a press conference. “And what that gives us is incredible flexibility. In fact, we have mobility; we can fly to space from any place that can host a 747, which is almost any place, and we can go to any orbit.”

 

At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Virgin Orbit has yet to actually put LauncherOne in to orbit, though the company has done a fair amount of testing on all of the hardware to make it happen. Engineers at Virgin Orbit have conducted numerous ignition tests with LauncherOne’s engine, called NewtonThree, at the company’s test facility at the Mojave Air and Space Port.

 

Virgin Orbit’s main pilot, Kelly Latimer, has been routinely flying Cosmic Girl, going through the maneuvers she’ll need to do during an actual launch. And the team has done various tests with LauncherOne in the air, rehearsing everything but the part where the rocket’s engines ignite. The company has carried the rocket underneath the wing of Cosmic Girl a few times, and the team even dropped a dummy LauncherOne from the plane, to see if the rocket fell as they expected.

 

 

Getting to this launch has taken slightly more time than Virgin Orbit had anticipated. Originally, the company had hoped to fly LauncherOne as early as last summer, but the team wound up doing more work to develop the rocket. “We did add some tests along the way as we looked at the overall verification program,” Hart said. “And so we adjusted accordingly. The internal focus of the team was really to move through a methodical development process.” Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the company to pause operations briefly this year and rework how people operate in the Virgin Orbit factories in Long Beach.

 

But now, it’s finally time to fly. LauncherOne is loaded up with a weighted dummy payload that the company has treated like an actual customer’s satellite. That means the team has been handling it with care and even cleaning it, as if it were the real thing. “In itself, it is not a terribly exciting thing,” Will Pomerantz, vice president of special projects at Virgin Orbit, said during the press conference. “You know, it is essentially a nice-looking inert mass that allowed us to practice all those things we really wanted to practice.”

 

To get this mass into orbit, the plan is for Latimer to take off from the Mojave Air and Space Port with LauncherOne. She’ll then fly Cosmic Girl out over the Pacific and position the plane over the rocket’s drop point. Latimer will release the rocket and a few seconds later, the engines should ignite and start LauncherOne’s trip to space. Virgin Orbit has a four-hour launch window for this mission that begins at 1PM ET on Monday. Originally, the company had hoped to launch Sunday, but had to postpone due to the discovery of a sensor acting funny. The company will only launch if all the weather criteria and other restrictions are met, but so far, Hart says weather is looking good.

 

Virgin Orbit is prepared to learn from this flight and is realistic about the possibility of something going wrong. “History is not terribly kind necessarily to maiden flights,” Pomerantz said, noting that about half of inaugural launches of new rockets fail. The team is also prepared to do another test launch if necessary after this one.

 

But if all goes well, the goal is for the company to move rapidly to commercial service. Its first customer flight is for NASA, launching up to 10 small satellites developed mostly by universities on a mission called ELaNa XX. That should be one of a handful that Virgin Orbit does this year. “We expect to get to one or two more flights this year, as we understand and mature the system,” Hart said. That cadence may increase next year.

 

Once commercial operations get into full swing, Virgin Orbit will become one of just a handful of US companies with an operational rocket dedicated to launching small payloads into orbit. However, the company has a lot of competition coming up quick, with numerous startups developing similar types of launch vehicles to capitalize on the small satellite revolution. And other major players, like SpaceX, are trying to get in on the market too, by offering to pack multiple small satellites on their larger rockets to get numerous tiny vehicles into space at once.

 

Virgin Orbit is optimistic, though, claiming to have customer contracts from commercial companies, NASA, the Department of Defense, and even international partners, that add up to hundreds of millions of dollars. The company also set its pre-launch price for rides on LauncherOne at $12 million, but the company says that will evolve over time. “Our pricing obviously will follow the market as we get into full operations,” Hart said. “And we’ll adjust accordingly.”

 

Above all, Hart thinks that launching from a plane instead of a fixed launchpad will make the company more attractive to prospective customers. “We are really completely unique in the field in that we have this flexibility and that we’re not launching out of a congested range,” said Hart.

 

 

Source: Small satellite launcher Virgin Orbit fails to launch rocket to space during first test flight (The Verge)

[dufus]

that,s knicker island down the dunny ..

[Karlston]

Virgin Orbit loses its first rocket shortly after engine ignition

“An anomaly then occurred early in first stage flight.”

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After more than seven years of development, testing, and preparation, Virgin Orbit reached an important moment on Monday—dropping and igniting its LauncherOne rocket over the Pacific Ocean. Unfortunately, shortly after ignition an "anomaly" occurred, the company said.

 

"LauncherOne maintained stability after release, and we ignited our first stage engine, NewtonThree," the company stated on Twitter. "An anomaly then occurred early in first stage flight. We'll learn more as our engineers analyze the mountain of data we collected today."

 

This was the company's first attempt to ignite LauncherOne. Previously, it had strapped the liquid-fueled rocket to its modified 747 aircraft and flown out over the Pacific Ocean but not released the booster from beneath the plane's wing.

 

After Monday's launch attempt the crew on board the 747 and a chase plane safely made it back to the Mojave Air & Space Port without harm. The company stressed that it now has plenty of data to dig into and is "eager" to get on to its next flight.

 

In an interview, the company's vice president of special projects, Will Pomerantz, said the rocket dropped from the plane as intended and in a controlled manner. The engine also ignited when and how they expected—a real challenge for a mid-air, liquid fueled rocket. "That is the biggest single technical risk of the program retired," Pomerantz said.

 

After ignition, the engine burned for "a couple" of seconds before something happened with the booster. The launch team is already reviewing data to learn whether this was a hardware, software, or some other type of issue. "We’ve got some good reasons for optimism based upon our very early looks at the data," Pomerantz said.

A capstone test 

Prior to Monday's test, Virgin Orbit officials attempted to set expectations fairly low for the flight, which carried no commercial payload. "The data is the product of this flight," the company's chief executive, Dan Hart, said during a call with reporters on Saturday. By extension, every second of the rocket's flight would bring additional data. The company had hoped for minutes of data as LauncherOne climbed to orbit, however.

 

Virgin Orbit did not conduct Monday's test casually. It was the endpoint of an incremental, years-long campaign to put the aircraft and rocket through a series of increasingly complicated tests. "We’ve done everything we can think of that we should do, including filling up the rocket and flying it out to the drop point," Hart said. "You essentially get to a point where you have looked under every rock to verify whether the system is ready."

 

The company presently has about 500 employees, working primarily out of its offices in Long Beach, California. It plans to launch payloads of up to 300kg to low-Earth orbit on LauncherOne at a base price of $12 million. Very roughly, with that level of staffing, Virgin Orbit probably needs to reach a cadence of 10 to 12 flights a year to break even.

 

Asked about the company's financial situation, Hart declined to directly answer. He said Saturday the company was "locked in place" right now with a focus on the test flight. He did say that Virgin Orbit has a backlog of launch contracts worth "hundreds of millions" of dollars. The company also has an important customer in the US military, which is interested in the potential to launch rapidly and reliably, into any orbital inclination, with the mobility of the 747 aircraft.

 

But first, Virgin Orbit has to get flying. The company did not say when it will make its next attempt, which seems reasonable considering the need to diagnose Monday's failure and apply those lessons to future tests. The company does appear to be hardware rich, with another rocket ready to go if there was not some serious hardware issue at fault.

 

Listing image by VirginOrbit

 

 

Source: Virgin Orbit loses its first rocket shortly after engine ignition (Ars Technica)  

 

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