Virgin Orbit launches a rocket from a 747 aircraft

Virgin Orbit launches a rocket from a 747 aircraft

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Virgin Orbit’s 747, nicknamed Cosmic Girl, took off from California at about 10:30 a.m. with the rocket called LauncherOne, located under the left wing of the aircraft. The plane flew over the Pacific Ocean before the rocket was released, freeing LauncherOne and allowing it to propel its rocket engine and propel itself at more than 17,000 miles per hour, fast enough to begin orbiting the earth.

“In both a literal and figurative sense, it’s miles beyond what we achieved in our first Launch Demo,” the company said. mailed on his Twitter account.

The rocket flew a group of small satellites on behalf of NASA’s educational launch of Nanosatellites, or ELaNa, which enables high school and university students to design and compile small satellites that NASA then pays to send into space. The nine small satellites that Virgin Orbit flew Sunday include the University of Colorado Temperature Monitoring Satellite in Boulder, a satellite that will study how small particles collide in space from the University of Central Florida, and an experimental radiation detection satellite from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

About four hours after takeoff on Saturday, Virgin Orbit confirmed in a tweet that all the satellites had been “successfully deployed in our target orbit.”

The successful mission makes Virgin Orbit only the third so-called “New Space” company – new ventures hoping to revamp the traditional industry with innovative technology – after SpaceX and Rocket Lab. The success also paves the way for Virgin Orbit to launch satellites with the launch of satellites for a number of customers, including NASA, the military and private sector that uses satellites for commercial purposes.

In 2017, Virgin Orbit separated from Virgin Galactic, a company focused on human spacecraft. Virgin Orbit performed a “drop test” of its LauncherOne rocket, which caused the vehicle to fly over the Pacific Ocean and plunge into the ocean for the veterinarian’s 747 release mechanism. Virgin Orbit’s first attempt to place a rocket in orbit took place last May when LauncherOne malfunctioned shortly after release and the flight was interrupted. The failure was not unexpected.

“It’s surprisingly difficult to launch from Earth to space,” the company said after its 2020 launch effort.

Virgin Orbit had expected to try a second launch attempt at the end of 2020, but the company was forced to postpone it after some “of the employees tested positive for Covid-19, according to an email from the company. has exposed many employees to the virus and under preventive quarantine, the company said.
Virgin Galactic abruptly suspends the flight of the spacecraft

“We are grateful and happy that most of our teammates have since cleared their preventative quarantines, and have enabled us to continue operations before launch,” the company said on December 31, “although with even more extremes. measures to protect the health and safety of our team. ‘

Virgin Orbit, like other space technology companies in the United States, was allowed to continue throughout the pandemic because the government viewed the space sector as a critical infrastructure in March. As one industry group has argued, the sector’s commercial activity is also intertwined with major U.S. national security projects and NASA programs.

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