Virgin OrbitThe name of is no longer purely aspirational.
The company Rocket LauncherOne arrived in orbit today (January 17) on its second motorized test flight, a mission called Launch Demo 2. And that’s not all: the rocket has also successfully deployed 10 tiny cubosat, which flew through NASA’s nanosatellites educational launch program.
“Payloads successfully deployed in our target orbit! We are very, very proud to say that LauncherOne has now completed its first space mission, loading 9 cubed missions into Earth orbit for our friends @NASA. # LaunchDemo2,” Virgin Orbit announced via Twitter today. (One of the nine missions featured two Cubosats, so the total number of spacecraft launched was 10.)
In photos: Virgin Orbit LauncherOne Rocket for Satellite Missions
Payloads successfully deployed in our target orbit! We are very, very proud to say that LauncherOne has now completed its first space mission, taking 9 CubeSat missions to Low Earth Orbit for our friends @NASA. # LaunchDemo2January 17, 2021
The 70-foot (21-meter) long, two-stage LauncherOne, which is capable of delivering up to 1,100 pounds. (500 kilograms) to orbit, took off from California’s Mojave Air and Space Port today at around 1:40 pm EST (1840 GMT; 10:40 am California local time). The rocket left the ground under the wing of its Boeing 747 aircraft carrier, known as Cosmic Girl.
This air launch strategy – which Virgin Orbit’s sister company Virgin Galactic also employs with its suborbital space plane, SpaceShipTwo – increases flexibility and responsiveness compared to traditional rockets launched vertically, said Virgin Orbit representatives.
Pilots Kelly Latimer and Todd Ericson took Cosmic Girl southwest, crossing the Pacific Ocean west of the Los Angeles area. About an hour after takeoff, at an altitude of approximately 35,000 feet (10,700 m), LauncherOne broke free from the plane and started its first-stage NewtonThree engine to make its own way into space.
NewtonThree reached its three-minute burn, reaching a milestone that LauncherOne failed to achieve in its first orbital attempt, the May 2020 launch demonstration mission. During the previous flight, a broken propellant line right after the first stage firing starts, ending the test.
But today, LauncherOne continues to tick the boxes. The upper stage of the rocket successfully separated and fired its NewtonFour engine as planned, and LauncherOne entered orbit around our planet.
About 45 minutes after its first burn, NewtonFour caught fire again, circling the orbit of the upper stage. Shortly thereafter, the upper stage deployed the 10 tiny satellites, provided by eight different university groups and NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.
This was a major achievement for Virgin Orbit, which aims to conquer a considerable part of the growing market for launching small satellites. This market is currently dominated by Rocket Lab, whose electron booster has been operational since 2018.
But the competition looks set to start to heat up considerably, and not just from Virgin Orbit. For example, the 38-foot-high Astra California startup Rocket 3.2 reached space for the first time last month, on the company’s second orbital test flight. And several other companies, such as Firefly Aerospace and Relativity Space, will start flying their own small satellite launchers in the near future, if all goes according to plan.
The vehicles above are all designed to take tours dedicated to relatively small spaceships. This is not the only way for these satellites to fly; they can also hitchhike as secondary payloads on large rockets like the SpaceX workhorse Falcon 9. But these missions are tailor-made for large primary loads, so they generally do not provide such accurate delivery for small satellites riding on the back.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book on the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.