dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

>>18114068

Virgin Orbit’s attempt to make history by launching the first set of satellites from British soil Monday night did not go as planned, resulting in the loss of all nine satellites on board.

Cosmic Girl, a modified 747, taxied toward history as it took off at 5:02 p.m. EST from Spaceport Cornwall in Newquay, England, hoping to successfully christen a new spaceport. Once it reached 35,000 feet in the air, the aircraft deployed a rocket, called LauncherOne, which would then launch its paylods into space.

Tucked inside LauncherOne’s payload fairing were nine small satellites, representing seven different customers. The two-stage rocket is specially designed to horizontally launch small satellites into orbit. Rather than a traditional rocket, which lifts off vertically from a launch pad, the LauncherOne is engineered to be strapped to a plane and ignited at a certain altitude before depositing its payloads into their designated orbits.

The rocket’s first stage and second stages separated as planned, with the rocket’s upper stage completing a nearly five-minute burn before transitioning into a long coast ahead of payload deployment. After ignition, it soon became clear that something wasn’t right.

“It appears that LauncherOne has suffered an anomaly, which will prevent us from making orbit on this mission,” Virgin Orbit’s Chris Relf, director of systems engineering and verification, said during a webcast of the mission. Details were not immediately available, but company officials did share that the anomaly resulted in the loss of all nine payloads on board the rocket.

LauncherOne carried nine small satellites inside its payload fairing, including payloads for the British Ministry of Defense, the British government, a Polish Cubesat, a satellite for the Sultanate of Oman, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3806290-virgin-orbit-suffers-in-flight-anomaly-during-historic-first-mission-from-uk/