A new breed of launch vehicle had a shaky first outing today when Virgin Orbit released its LauncherOne rocket from a modified Boeing 747 jumbo jet flying over the Pacific Ocean for its first blastoff.
“We’ve confirmed a clean release from the aircraft,” Virgin Orbit reported in a tweet. “However, the mission terminated shortly into the flight.”
In a follow-up Twitter thread, Virgin Orbit said the rocket maintained its stability after release and fired up its first-stage engine. “An anomaly then occurred early in first-stage flight,” the company said.
The carrier airplane, known as Cosmic Girl, and its crew landed safely back at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port after the test. “We’ll learn more as our engineers analyze the mountain of data we collected today,” Virgin Orbit said.
Here’s our next rocket, built and ready for system-level testing in our final integration area as it waits for its turn to fly to space. pic.twitter.com/Zhc2uDtMMC
— Virgin Orbit (@Virgin_Orbit) May 25, 2020
The two-stage LauncherOne rocket is theoretically capable of sending payloads weighing up to 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) into low Earth orbit. Today’s test payload was designed to collect data about the rocket’s performance and beam those readings back to Earth, potentially all the way up into orbit.
Virgin Orbit’s technology builds on the air-launch legacy of SpaceShipOne, the rocket plane that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize back in 2004 with financial support from the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
There’s another connection to Seattle’s aerospace heritage: Before becoming Virgin Orbit’s CEO and president, Dan Hart spent more than three decades at Boeing, working on space systems ranging from satellite programs to NASA’s space shuttles.
Today’s test mission came after years of development, stretching back to British billionaire Richard Branson’s licensing of the air-launch technology from Allen and Mojave-based Scaled Composites.
At first, the LauncherOne project was part of Virgin Galactic, which has focused on a piloted rocket plane called SpaceShipTwo. Virgin Orbit was spun off from Virgin Galactic in 2017 — and while Virgin Galactic became its own publicly traded company last year, Virgin Orbit has remained under the wing of the Virgin Group.
Air-launch systems can provide more versatility for space missions, since the carrier airplane can be based at any airport that has a runway long enough for takeoff. Also, the airplane can adjust its flight path to fly around troublesome weather systems, and launch payloads into any inclination.
For those reasons, the U.S. military is particularly interested in what Virgin Orbit and its launch services subsidiary, VOX Space, have to offer. Last month, VOX Space won a $35 million contract from the Space Force to launch 44 small satellites into orbit with three launches.
LauncherOne makes use of a new line of liquid-fueled rocket engines known as the Newton. A dummy version of the rocket was dropped during a flight test last July, but today marked the first time that the NewtonThree and NewtonFour engines were to be put to the test during flight.
The pilots for today’s roughly 100-minute test outing were Kelly Latimer and Todd Ericson. Before joining Virgin, Latimer was an Air Force test pilot with experience at McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma, Wash., and the first female research test pilot at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California. Ericson is also a former Air Force test pilot.