Sunday morning, Virgin Orbit became the third privately funded American rocket company to reach orbit and the only one to achieve the feat from the air. The company’s liquid fuel rocket, called LauncherOne, was released from under the wing of Cosmic girl, The custom Boeing 747 from Virgin Orbit, off the coast of California. Cosmic girlThe pilot, Kelly Latimer, separated from the rocket at about 30,000 feet (the cruising height of a typical passenger plane) and, after a few seconds of free fall, LauncherOne started the engines and drove to the space. Once in orbit, the rocket released its payload of 10 cubes built by NASA researchers and several American universities before falling back to Earth.
The success of the pitch meant a welcome victory for Virgin’s team, who suffered setbacks since their first pitching attempt last spring. That first test flight in May was aborted seconds after the rocket launched due to a break in its fuel line. After engineers identified and fixed the problem, company officials planned a second launch in December, but decided to postpone it as Covid-19 cases escalated around its Los Angeles headquarters.
“We’ve done a lot to ensure the safety of the team, and much of our launch operations and activities are virtual,” Dan Hart, CEO of Virgin Orbit, told reporters in a pre-launch call on Sunday. “Doing it in the face of a pandemic is really amazing.”
Today’s launch marked the culmination of nearly a decade of work by engineers at Virgin Orbit, which is 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 under a custom plane, which sent them to the edge of space. Clearly, Branson loves to throw things from planes and has endowed both companies with engineers and pilots who make it easy. Now the question is: can you turn it into a sustainable business?
The air launch is usually associated with missiles aimed at targets on the Earth’s surface, but also has a long history in the space industry. The first orbital rocket launched by air, known as Pegasus, was sent into orbit in the early 1990s by Orbital Sciences Corporation, which has since folded into Northrop Grumman. Like LauncherOne, Pegasus is able to lift into space about 1,000 pounds of payload and the rocket drops from the belly of a gutted passenger plane. But in the last 30 years, Pegasus has performed only 44 missions. To put it in perspective, SpaceX has flown more than twice as long as the last decade.
“When I started studying feasibility studies and wondering if we should do this, Pegasus was the flashing neon sign that blinked 24/7,” Will Pomerantz, vice president of special projects at Virgin Orbit, told WIRED. of the company’s first launch attempt last May. “Technologically, Pegasus is a huge success. But from a market perspective, maybe not ”.
Pomerantz says the reason Pegasus failed to attract many customers is that when it was launched, those customers did not exist. The small satellite commercial industry has exploded in recent years and there are now hundreds of companies looking for an economical trip into space. Pegasus is still close, but its launch cost has risen over the past few decades. In the 1990s, NASA paid $ 16 million for a Pegasus launch. Today it costs more than $ 60 million. Even taking into account inflation, this cost has almost tripled and exceeds 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.