Sunday morning, Virgin Orbit became the third privately funded American rocket company to reach orbit – and the only one to do so from the air. The company’s liquid-powered rocket, called LauncherOne, was launched from under its wing Cosmic girl, Boeing 747 custom Virgin Orbit off the coast of California. Cosmic girlIts pilot, Kelly Latimer, broke away 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 stepped into space. Once in orbit, the rocket released its payload of 10 cubesats built by researchers at NASA and several American universities before it fell back to Earth.
The successful launch was a welcome victory for the Virgin team, which was hit by failures since the first launch attempt last spring. The first test flight in May was interrupted a few seconds after the rocket was released due to a burst in its propulsion line. After engineers identified and fixed the problem, company officials planned a second launch in December, but decided to postpone it as the Covid-19 cases revolved around their Los Angeles headquarters.
“We’ve made a huge amount of money to ensure the team’s safety and much of our launch operations and activities are virtual,” Dan Hart, CEO of Virgin Orbit, told reporters ahead of Sunday’s launch. “Doing this in the face of a pandemic is truly amazing.”
Today’s launch marked the culmination of almost a decade of work by engineers at Virgin Orbit, which is one of two rocket companies founded by billionaire Richard Branson. In 2018, the sister company Virgin Orbit, Virgin Galactic, made history by launching a spacecraft carrying two people under a custom plane, which sent them rocket to the edge of space. Branson clearly loves to launch things from airplanes and has framed both companies with engineers and pilots to show them easily. Now the question is: can it turn it into a sustainable business?
Air launch is usually associated with rockets that are intended for targets on the Earth’s surface, but has a long history in the space industry. The first orbital rocket launched from the air, known as Pegasus, was launched into orbit in the early 1990s by Orbital Sciences Corporation, which has since been deployed to Northrop Grumman. Like LauncherOne, Pegasus is able to lift about 1,000 kilograms of payload into space, and the rocket is thrown from the belly of a gutted passenger jet. But in the last 30 years, Pegasus has performed only 44 missions. To put this in perspective, SpaceX has flown more than twice as many times in the last decade.
“When I started looking at feasibility studies and wondering if we should do this, Pegasus was the flashing neon sign blinking in my vision 24/7,” said Will Pomerantz, vice president of special projects at Virgin. Orbit, for WIRED before the company’s first attempt to launch last May. “From a technological point of view, 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 now there are hundreds of companies looking for a cheap trip to space. Pegasus is still around, but its launch cost has risen in recent decades. In the 1990s, NASA paid $ 16 million for the launch of Pegasus. Today it costs close to $ 60 million. Even accounting for 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 the time has come.