Britain’s first attempt to launch an orbital rocket in over half a century has failed today after the second stage of the mission’s Virgin Orbit rocket malfunctioned due to an undisclosed problem.
The Start Me Up mission begins at 20:02 GMT with test pilot Matthew “Stanny” Stanford and co-pilot Eric Vippert flying the Cosmic Girl, a modified Boeing 747-400 airliner that serves as a mothership for deploying Virgin. took off under control. Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket. Also on board were his engineers Dale Alexander and Bryce Shaffer, who oversee the operations.
The LauncherOne rocket was dropped from Cosmic Girl at approximately 23:09 GMT over the Atlantic Ocean off Ireland at an altitude of 30,000 feet (9,100 m). The first stage ignited automatically and burned for three minutes. After separation, the second stage was programmed to perform her two burns of a total of six minutes and launch the payload into a desired circular orbit at an altitude of 345 miles (555 km). However, Mission Control announced that after the first burn, it suffered a malfunction that prevented the stage from reaching orbit.
Virgin Orbit
The first and only time a British rocket was launched into orbit was on October 28, 1971, when a Black Arrow booster launched the Prospero satellite into space from the Woomera Prohibition Zone in Australia. But by the time Prospero reached orbit, the British government had canceled the project for economic and diplomatic reasons, and Britain’s space efforts turned to building spacecraft, making her second only to the United States. became a big manufacturer.
That changed with the partnership between the British Space Agency (UKSA), Cornwall Council, the Royal Air Force and Virgin Orbit to establish a commercial space launch operation from Cornwall. This included not only developing the launch infrastructure, but also obtaining legal and regulatory permission to commercialize operations, including the rapid launch of small satellites if needed.
Costing about $12 million per launch, LauncherOne is a 70-foot (21.3 m), 30-ton, U.S.-made, liquid-fueled, two-stage rocket capable of lifting 1,100 pounds (500 kg). To low earth orbit, or 660 lbs (300 kg) to geostationary orbit.
Virgin Orbit
Today’s orbital launch attempt is the first from anywhere in Western Europe and the fifth Virgin Orbit launch intended to carry a civilian or government payload into orbit. Named after the 1981 Rolling Stones song, Start Me Up is a British IOD-3 AMBER, UK Ministry of Defense (MOD) Defense Prometheus-2 twin CubeSats at the Institute for Science and Technology (Dstl), the Cooperative Ionosphere Reconstruction CubeSat Experimental (CIRCE) satellite for Dstl, and the DOVER Global Navigation System SmallSat, Space Forge at the United States Naval Research Laboratory, RHEA Group in the United Kingdom ForgeStar-0 space manufacturing platform for Wales, Oman’s first orbital mission AMAN, and Polish small satellite manufacturer and operator SatRev’s STORK-6 satellite.
The video below is a live feed of the launch.
start me up
Source: Virgin Orbit
