The mystery of why the first orbital mission, launched from the UK, fell into the sea on January 9th has come to an end as Virgin Orbital announced telemetry showed a second stage engine had died prematurely. I shed some light on it today.
Virgin Orbit’s Start Me Up mission was supposed to be a historic event. The UK is back in the space launch business for the first time in half a century, marking the first launch from mainland Britain. But things suddenly took an unexpected turn.
The first was when a modified 747-400 airliner, Cosmic Girl, took off from spaceport Cornwall in western England and flew over the Atlantic Ocean to drop a LauncherOne rocket carrying a payload of nine small satellites. seemed to be going well. The launch and separation of the first stage went according to plan, as the rocket reached hypersonic speed in the upper atmosphere, but then something went wrong.
It wasn’t immediately clear what was happening as the telemetry feed switched from one ground station to another. This caused the published tally of speed and altitude to suddenly jump back and forth. Then, when Start Me Up reached an altitude of 112 miles (180 km), the second stage engine shut down prematurely, preventing the spacecraft from reaching orbit and causing the rocket’s North/South Safety Along Earth sent to burn up in the atmosphere of South Atlantic Corridor.
According to Virgin Orbit, a wealth of telemetry data helped engineers narrow down the location of the failure, but the cause was a formal review led by aerospace veteran Jim Sponnick and principal investigator Chad Foerster. Still under investigation by the commission. Chief Engineer and Vice President of Technology Development.
“We are all disappointed that we were not able to complete the mission successfully and provide the launch service our customers deserved,” said Dan Hart, CEO of Virgin Orbit. . “Once we identified the anomaly, our team immediately went into pre-planned investigation mode. We have a deep understanding of the LauncherOne system from the large amount of flight data collected, and sufficient telemetry data has been collected to characterize the flight and anomalies.I am confident that root causes and corrective actions will be determined efficiently and in a timely manner. We are continuing to process and test our next vehicle according to plan and will implement it if necessary.We will make changes before the next launch.
“I also want to express my sincere thanks to our team for their tireless efforts under pressure and difficult circumstances, and most importantly to our customers, supporters and partners in the UK, US and around the world. The many expressions of trust and support we have received over the past two days.”
Source: Virgin Orbit
