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All went well during the early stages of a historic launch attempt by Virgin Orbit on Monday evening as the rocket began its journey into space over the Atlantic Ocean, southwest of Ireland.
Shortly after the LauncherOne rocket from the Cosmic girl aircraft, the NewtonThree main engine smartly lights up and the first stage climbed to orbit. The engine shutdown of the first stage appeared to be nominal, with the second stage igniting to complete the 8.5 minute burn to low Earth orbit.
Unfortunately, the information from Virgin Orbit’s webcast and Twitter feed got confusing after this point. While the webcast telemetry data suggested that the missile’s altitude was beginning to drop, the host made no comment, explaining instead that the missile’s telemetry data could be erratic. And a few minutes later, Virgin Orbit tweeted that its rocket and nine payloads had successfully reached orbit.
Only, they didn’t. Thirty-five minutes after the rocket ignited, and long after it should have entered orbit, the company tweeted that a problem had occurred. “We seem to have an anomaly that prevents us from getting into orbit. We are evaluating the information,” the company said via Twitter. The earlier tweet claiming the mission had been successful has been deleted.
Although the webcast ran about half an hour longer, Virgin Orbit gave no more information about the anomaly that prevented the upper stage and its payloads from reaching orbit.
This is likely to be a devastating launch failure for Virgin Orbit, a US-based small launch company trying to find its niche in the launch market. Prior to Monday’s launch, the company reached orbit on four of its first five attempts, a good record for a startup rocket company. But it struggled to achieve a high number of missions, a prerequisite for breaking even financially by cashing checks for launch contracts.
Monday’s attempt from the UK – a historic first attempt at launching from orbit – was a high-profile opportunity to show investors what the company was capable of, and to impress UK officials on hand to watching the missile-carrying plane take off from a spaceport in south west England.
British officials had worked for eight years to bring a horizontal launch capability to Spaceport Cornwall, which is located on the site of Newquay Airport, a former Royal Air Force station. During that time, officials from the spaceport, the UK Space Agency and Virgin Orbit have been working to address regulatory concerns related to handling the missile in Cornwall and launching it across international waters to the southwest of Ireland.
Now the first orbital launch attempt from the UK has ended in failure. British officials, who may need convincing to keep the company financially stable, were probably unimpressed. So did the missile’s customers, including the United States and United Kingdom governments. For Virgin Orbit, the first launch attempt from the UK was a lot of tosh.
