Virgin Orbit launches rocket from a 747 aircraft

Virgin Orbit launches rocket from a 747 aircraft

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The Virgin Orbit 747, nicknamed the Cosmic Girl, took off from California at about 10:30 am PT with the rocket, called LauncherOne, nestled under the left wing of the plane. The aircraft flew over the Pacific Ocean before the rocket was launched, releasing LauncherOne and allowing it to start the rocket’s engine and propel itself at more than 17,000 miles per hour, fast enough to start orbiting Earth.

“In both a literal and figurative sense, this is way beyond what we achieved in our first launch demo,” the company posted on your Twitter account.

The rocket flew in a group of tiny satellites in the name of NASA’s nanosatellite educational launch program, or ELaNa, which allows high school and college students to design and assemble small satellites that NASA pays to launch into space. The nine small satellites Virgin Orbit flew on Sunday include a temperature monitoring satellite from the University of Colorado at Boulder, a satellite that will study how small particles collide in the University of Central Florida space and an experimental radiation detection satellite from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

About four hours after takeoff on Saturday, Virgin Orbit confirmed in a tweet that all satellites were “successfully deployed in our target orbit”.

The successful mission makes Virgin Orbit only the third company called “New Space” – startups that intend to reform traditional industry with innovative technologies – to reach orbit, after SpaceX and Rocket Lab. Success also opens the way for Virgin Orbit will start launching satellites for a number of customers it already has, including NASA, military and private sector companies that use satellites for commercial purposes.

Virgin Orbit was derived from Virgin Galactic, a company focused on suborbital human space flights, in 2017. Virgin Orbit conducted several “crash tests” of its LauncherOne rocket, which involved flying the vehicle over the Pacific and letting it dive into the ocean to be a veterinarian the 747 release mechanism. Virgin Orbit’s first attempt to put a rocket into orbit came last May, when LauncherOne malfunctioned shortly after launch and the flight was aborted. This failure was not unexpected.

“Launching from Earth into space is frighteningly difficult,” said the company after the 2020 launch attempt.

Virgin Orbit hoped to try a second orbital launch attempt in late 2020, but the company was forced to delay after “some” of its employees tested positive for Covid-19, according to an email from the company. This left many employees potentially exposed to the virus and in preventive quarantine, the company said.
Virgin Galactic unexpectedly aborts space plane test flight

“We are grateful and fortunate that the majority of our teammates have since cleared their preventive quarantines, allowing us to proceed with pre-launch operations,” said the company on December 31, “although with even more extreme measures in place. to protect the health and safety of our team. “

Virgin Orbit, like other space technology companies in the United States, is allowed to continue operations during the pandemic because the government considered the space sector to be part of the country’s “critical infrastructure” in March. As one industry group argued, the industry’s commercial activity is also linked to crucial U.S. national security projects and NASA programs.

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