Virgin Orbit and Rocket Lab teams are gearing up for their first missions of the year in the coming days, with Virgin’s air rocket set for their second demonstration flight and Rocket Lab’s Electron booster ready to launch a small satellite German-owned communications network.
Virgin Orbit’s second airborne test flight is scheduled for no earlier than Wednesday, January 13. Ten CubeSats from US universities and a NASA research center are on board the rocket, which will be launched from Virgin Orbit’s Boeing 747. the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California.
The first 2021 Rocket Lab flight is scheduled for a 10-day opening on Saturday, January 16. A two-stage electron launcher will take a European technology demonstration satellite in orbit from the Rocket Lab base in New Zealand to OHB Group, an aerospace company based in Bremen, Germany.
Virgin Orbit, part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, is trying to prove its commercial LauncherOne rocket after its first orbital launch attempt in May failed seconds after it fell from the 747 jumbo jet. The company said a break in the liquid oxygen supply line to the LauncherOne’s first stage engine caused the failure a few seconds after the engine ignited.
The LauncherOne vehicle can deliver up to 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) of payload for a low-altitude equatorial orbit, or up to 661 pounds (300 kilograms) for a 310-mile (500 km) high polar orbit, according to Virgin Orbit.
Virgin Orbit is trying to join Rocket Lab as the only company in a new wave of privately funded smallsat launch providers to successfully put a payload into orbit. Astra, another launch startup, successfully launched an Alaskan space rocket last month, but the upper stage shut down prematurely close to orbital speed.
Rocket Lab successfully reached orbit for the first time in 2018. The company’s Electron rocket family has been launched 17 times so far, with two failures, deploying nearly 100 small satellites for commercial, NASA and US military customers.
The launch of the 18th Electron, scheduled for before January 16, will launch a small communications satellite for OHB.
The seven-minute launch window on January 16 opens at 2:38 am EST (0738 GMT), according to Rocket Lab. The mission will take off from Launch Complex 1A at Rocket Lab’s private spaceport on the Mahia Peninsula, located on the North Island of New Zealand.
Rocket Lab is based in Long Beach, California, but carries out the final rocket assembly and launch operations in New Zealand. Later this year, Rocket Lab plans to launch its first mission for a new facility at the Mid-Atlantic regional spaceport in Virginia, and will send a small NASA-funded spacecraft to the moon.
Rocket Lab launch pad teams in New Zealand are also completing construction of Launch Complex 1B near the company’s first launch pad. The company says that the first launch of the new platform in New Zealand is also scheduled for later this year.
Rocket Lab dubbed the first 2021 mission “Another Leave the Crust”.
The OHB Group, which builds small and medium-sized satellites, acquired the launch of Rocket Lab through its subsidiary OHB Cosmos, according to Rocket Lab.
The payload of the OHB is a “single communication microsatellite that will allow specific frequencies to support future orbit services,” said the Rocket Lab in a statement. OHB and Rocket Lab have not released additional details about the satellite, which was built by the OHB divisions in Germany, Sweden and the Czech Republic.
Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, said the launch will take place within six months of signing the contract with Rocket Lab and OHB, a relatively quick return to a launch service agreement.
“By flying as a dedicated mission at Electron, OHB and its mission partners have control over launch time, orbit, integration scheduling and other mission parameters,” said Beck in a statement.
Rocket Lab does not plan to recover Electron’s first stage in the mission set for January 16. The company recovered an Electron first stage for the first time after a November launch, an initial step towards eventually reusing Electron boosters to increase Rocket Lab’s launch rate.
Rocket Lab’s seven Electron flights in 2020 set a record for the company, which says it has a “full” launch schedule for three platforms in 2021.
Virgin Orbit, for its part, is trying to join Rocket Lab in the market for launching small satellites.
The dedicated launch of Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket costs about $ 12 million, according to company managers. Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket, which has a slightly lower lift capacity than Virgin’s LauncherOne, costs about $ 7 million per mission.
The effort to develop the LauncherOne rocket began as a project by sister company Virgin Galactic, which focuses on the suborbital space tourism market.
Virgin Galactic says it first studied the LauncherOne concept in 2007 and development started for real in 2012. Engineers in 2015 discarded initial plans to launch Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo aircraft carrier rocket and started developing a system redesigned using a 747 jumbo jet taken from Virgin Atlantic’s commercial airline fleet.
Headquartered in Long Beach – close to Rocket Lab’s corporate headquarters – Virgin Orbit was founded in 2017 as a Virgin Galactic spinoff. Virgin Orbit’s investors include Branson’s Virgin Group and Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund.
Virgin Orbit’s first demonstration launch in May carried a small spherical satellite called Starshine 4, a passive charge covered by 1,000 small mirrors polished by students through an educational program nearly two decades ago.
The 40 pound (18 kg) Starshine 4 satellite was supposed to launch on a space shuttle mission, but was stopped after other payloads took priority while the space shuttle’s final flights focused on completing the International Space Station.
The Starshine 4 payload was launched for free on Virgin Orbit’s first test flight, but the satellite never reached orbit.
NASA is the customer for the second test flight of LauncherOne, which Virgin Orbit calls “Launch Demo 2”. Virgin Orbit postponed the December mission due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic.
The U.S. space agency signed a contract with Virgin Galactic, Virgin Orbit’s former parent company, in 2015 through the Venture Class Launch Services program. NASA established the VCLS program to provide in-orbit tours for small research nanosatellites and help give business to start-ups that develop small satellite launchers.
Rocket Lab also received a VCLS contract in 2015. The launch provider successfully completed the VCLS mission in December 2018, when an Electron mission placed 13 NASA-sponsored CubeSats into orbit.
The 10 CubeSats aboard Virgin Orbit’s Launch Demo 2 mission were built by college students in California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Tennessee and Utah. NASA is paying for the launch of the university-built CubeSats.
Another NASA CubeSat mission, called TechEdSat 7, from the agency’s Ames Research Center, is also on board the LauncherOne rocket.
Send an email to the author.
Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.