![]() “Nothing like this ever happens in Cornwall,” says a resident from Bodmin, about 25 kilometres from Newquay. I used to come to the airfield and watch all the airshows, so to find out they’re going to be launching satellites from our own backyard is amazing,” says Jon Grigg from St Newlyn East, a village a few kilometres south of Newquay. SpaceX, Blue Origin and ULA plan to launch huge new rockets in 2023įor residents from Newquay and the surrounding villages, the spectacle of a satellite launch was not an everyday event. ![]() The lost payload included a test satellite from Welsh company Space Forge – which it hoped to use to manufacture unique semiconductors and alloys in orbit – small military communications satellites from the UK Ministry of Defence, a pair of ionospheric monitors launched in a joint US-UK military collaboration, maritime sensing satellites from Scottish company AAC Clyde Space, a European Space Agency GPS-tracker and an imaging satellite jointly launched by Oman and Poland. According to a spokesperson for the UK Space Agency (UKSA), the rocket reached low-Earth orbit but suffered an “anomaly” which caused it to abort its mission.Ī ripple of groans and mutters of “Oh no” spread through the crowd lining the runway as they learned that the satellite launch was not successful. ![]() The second stage accelerated the rocket to its cruise phase at 28,000 kilometres per hour. The first stage successfully took it to about 12,900 kilometres per hour. When the LauncherOne rocket was dropped from Cosmic Girl, it began its journey to low-Earth orbit. After Cosmic Girl left the airport, a large monitor tracked the plane’s progress towards the Irish Sea, where it was supposed to deploy the rocket and its payload of nine satellites. While there may not have been much to see in the skies, there was a festival atmosphere keeping spirits high on the ground, with food trucks and a silent disco lining the runway. Thousands of people were gathered near the runway to watch and cheer on the plane, Cosmic Girl, as it took off amid fierce winds and speakers blaring Start Me Up by the Rolling Stones. It isn’t certain whether the rocket and its satellites burned up in Earth’s atmosphere on reentry or came to ground over unpopulated areas. Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket, which took off attached to a Boeing 747 plane at 10.01pm GMT, began its ascent to orbit after about an hour into the flight, but around 25 minutes later the launcher “suffered an anomaly” and had to abort its mission. The first orbital satellite launch from the UK took off from Spaceport Cornwall in Newquay, but failed to deploy its satellites to orbit. Head over to Virgin Orbit’s website to find out more and follow the latest updates on Virgin Orbit’s next launch window on Twitter and Instagram.The LauncherOne rocket at Spaceport Cornwall In addition to the rapidly approaching mission that will bring orbital launch to the United Kingdom for the first time, Virgin Orbit has announced collaborative efforts to bring its unique air launch system to the nations of Australia, Brazil, Japan, Poland, and the Republic of Korea. Once manufactured, integrated, and tested, a LauncherOne rocket can be sent off to any of a variety of locations for final preparation and launch, responding to the needs of the commercial, civil, and national security space communities. The launch from the Cornwall spaceport will demonstrate Virgin Orbit’s ability to enable virtually any country to become a space faring nation. This capability creates a new level of mobility for satellite launch, thereby enabling sovereign launch capability in new markets. ![]() This reduction of nearly half of the time required between the company’s previous missions, along with a significant decrease in the cost of manufacturing, continues the trend of the company’s rapid evolution into a higher operational cadence.Īs an air-launched system, Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne can turn nearly any airport into a spaceport. The company’s most recent rocket completed its full wet dress rehearsal on 2 October, three months after the successful launch of its Straight Up mission. Those proven capabilities are vital to the exciting, emerging markets in responsive and international launch. In doing so, Virgin Orbit’s air-launched system has illustrated the robustness of its system by proving its ability to fly through and above inclement weather, integrate rapid-call up payloads, and reach a broader range of orbits than would be possible from a traditional ground-launched system. To date, the company has delivered each of the 33 satellites it has carried precisely to its desired orbit. With its newest rocket to date, Virgin Orbit looks to build on an unblemished track record of successful operational orbital launches.
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