Virgin Orbit‘s name is no longer pure.
The company’s Launcher A rocket reached orbit today (January 17) during its second powered test flight, a mission called Launch Demo 2. And that’s not all: the rocket also successfully deployed ten small cubes. flown via NASA’s Educational Launch of Nanosatellites Program.
“Payloads have been successfully deployed in our target orbit! We are so proud to say that LauncherOne has now completed its first mission to space, with 9 low-orbit cubic missions for our friends @ NASA. # LaunchDemo2,” Virgin Orbit announced today via Twitter. (One of the nine missions contains two cube sets, so the total number of spacecraft was 10.)
In photos: Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket for satellite missions
Payloads have been successfully used in our target range! We are so proud to say that LauncherOne has now completed its first mission to space and transported 9 CubeSat missions into the Low Earth orbit for our friends @NASA. # LaunchDemo217 January 2021
The 70-meter (21-meter) LauncherOne in two phases, delivering up to 1,100 pounds. (500 kilograms) to orbit, took off today from about 13:40 EST (1840 GMT; 10:40 local California time) from the Mojave Air and Space Port of California. The rocket left the ground under the wing of its Boeing 747 aircraft, known as Cosmic Girl.
This air launch strategy – which Virgin Orbit’s sister company Virgin Galactic also uses with its suborbital spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo – Increases flexibility and responsiveness compared to traditional vertical launched rockets, Virgin Orbit said.
Pilots Kelly Latimer and Todd Ericson took Cosmic Girl southwest and sailed across the Pacific Ocean west of the Los Angeles area. About an hour after it was lifted, at an altitude of about 10,000 meters (10,000 meters), LauncherOne fell off the plane and then ignited its first-phase NewtonThree engine to make its own way to space.
The NewtonThree lowered its three-minute burn and reached a milestone that LauncherOne could not reach during its first orbital effort, the May 2020 Launch Demo mission. During the previous flight, a propellant line burst just after the first phase started burning, the test came to an end.
But today, LauncherOne just kept marking boxes. The rocket’s upper stage successfully separated and shot its NewtonFour engine as planned, and LauncherOne slipped into orbit around our planet.
About 45 minutes after the first burn, the NewtonFour inflated again and circulated the track from the top stage. Shortly thereafter, the top ten small satellite satellites deployed by eight different university groups and NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley were deployed.
This was a great achievement for Virgin Orbit, which aims to launch a significant share of the growing small satellite market. The market is currently dominated by Rocket Laboratory, of which the Electron booster has been in operation since 2018.
But it looks like the competition will start to heat up considerably, and not just from Virgin Orbit. For example, the California startup Astras is 12 meters long (38 meters) Rocket 3.2 reached space last month for the first time on the company’s second orbital test flight. And several other companies, such as Firefly Aerospace and Relativity Space, will start flying with their own small satellite launchers in the near future if all goes according to plan.
The above vehicles are designed to give dedicated rides to relatively small spacecraft. This is not the only way such satellites can fly; they can also ride as secondary payloads on large rockets such as SpaceX’s work cell Valk 9. But such missions are adapted for the large primary payloads, and they usually do not provide such an accurate delivery for the small satellites that ride.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.