On Sunday morning, Virgin Orbit became the third privately funded American rocket company to reach orbit – and the only one to accomplish the feat from the air. The company’s liquid fuel rocket, called LauncherOne, was launched under the wing of the Cosmic Girl, Virgin Orbit’s custom Boeing 747 off the California coast. Cosmic girlThe pilot, Kelly Latimer, separated from the rocket at about 30,000 feet – the cruising altitude of a typical passenger jet – and after a few seconds of free fall, LauncherOne started its engines and fired into space. As soon as it reached orbit, the rocket launched its payload of 10 cubosat built by researchers from NASA and several American universities before falling back to Earth.
The successful launch was a welcome victory for the Virgin team, which has been hit by setbacks since its first launch attempt last spring. The first test flight in May was aborted seconds after the rocket was launched due to a break in its propellant line. After engineers identified and corrected the problem, company employees planned a second launch in December, but decided to postpone it as the Covid-19 cases increased at their Los Angeles headquarters.
“We have done a lot to ensure the safety of the team, and many of our launch operations and activities are virtual,” Dan Hart, Virgin Orbit’s CEO, told reporters by phone before Sunday’s launch. “Doing this in the face of a pandemic is really incredible.”
Today’s launch marked the culmination of nearly a decade of work by engineers at Virgin Orbit, one of two rocket companies founded by billionaire Richard Branson. In 2018, Virgin Orbit’s sister space company, Virgin Galactic, made history by launching a spacecraft carrying two humans from below a custom plane, which made them shoot to the edge of space. Branson loves to launch things from planes and has equipped both companies with engineers and pilots that make it look easy. Now the question is, can it turn it into a sustainable business?
The air launch is normally associated with missiles aimed at targets on the Earth’s surface, but it also has a long history in the space industry. The first orbital rocket launched into the air, known as Pegasus, was put into orbit in the early 1990s by Orbital Sciences Corporation, which has since been transformed into Northrop Grumman. Like LauncherOne, Pegasus is capable of sending about 1,000 pounds of payload into space, and the rocket is launched from the belly of a destroyed passenger jet. But in the past 30 years, Pegasus has flown only 44 missions. To put this in perspective, SpaceX has more than doubled in the past decade.
“When I started researching feasibility studies and wondering if we should do this, Pegasus was the flashing neon sign in my vision 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” said Will Pomerantz, vice president of special projects at Virgin Orbit , to WIRED ahead of the company’s first launch attempt last May. “Technologically, Pegasus is a great success. But from a market perspective, perhaps not. “
Pomerantz says that the reason Pegasus has failed to attract many customers is because, when it was launched, those customers did not exist. The small commercial satellite industry has exploded in recent years and there are now hundreds of companies looking for a cheap trip into space. Pegasus still exists, but its launch cost has skyrocketed in recent decades. In the 1990s, NASA paid $ 16 million for the launch of the Pegasus. Today it costs close to $ 60 million. Even considering inflation, this cost has almost tripled and is beyond what most of these small satellite companies can afford. The air launch was once an idea ahead of its time – but now Pomerantz believes its time has come.