Virgin Orbit Progressing Toward First LauncherOne Drop Test
LauncherOne attached to Cosmic Girl. (Credit: Virgin Orbit)
LONG BEACH, Calif. (Virgin Orbit PR) — The LauncherOne test program is moving really quickly now in the run-up to our first orbital test flight, as we finalize integration of the test rocket (more on that below) and continue to bang out flight test after flight test. With three successful heavyweight flights now under our belt, we’re soaring higher than a moonsault off the top rope!
Right now, we’re focused on nailing down the mission profile for the upcoming drop test. During our most recent sortie, Chief Test Pilot Kelly Latimer and her crew knocked out not just one but three simulated releases (and still had time to give a quick hello to Sir Richard over comms).
Richard Branson talks to the pilots of Cosmic Girl. (Credit: Virgin Orbit)
We even completed an extra takeoff and landing to demonstrate the system’s performance in higher crosswinds, allowing us to expand our window for acceptable flight conditions.
We also added a bit of fun and funky flair to that flight with a striking new paint job on LauncherOne. The new design on the fin cans was inspired by dazzle camouflage, and pays homage to the way art and technology can come together to create something beautiful.
Rocket #2 Debut
LauncherOne first flight rocket (Credit: Virgin Orbit)
Round 2 is going to be where this match really heats up! Although the captive carry test rocket that’s currently on Cosmic Girl has been stealing the spotlight, our first orbital test flight rocket has been busy backstage preparing for its own grand entrance.
As you can see above, we’ve got a fully integrated first stage and a fully integrated upper stage sitting side-by-side on our shop floor. But it’s not as simple as putting the two halves together and sending them off to space. First, we’ll put the rocket and Cosmic Girl through a rigorous check-out campaign called R2D2 (Rocket #2 Drills and Demonstrations), to ensure that our processes, procedures and people are aligned across the flight ops and launch ops teams.
Stay tuned for more info as we move into this final test sequence before first launch!
8 responses to “Virgin Orbit Progressing Toward First LauncherOne Drop Test”
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Looks like good progress. Wishing the team all the best and most importantly, that a market develops for their services as it appears they’ve done their homework when it comes to the hardware.
Virgin Orbit is going into a market that already has one established competitor, Rocket Lab, with the $6-million-per-launch, 250kg payload capacity Electron. Virgin Orbit LauncherOne will be charging $10 million for 300kg. I think we will see quite the battle between these two in the marketplace.
And soon they will be joined by Firefly, Relativity, and Vector, with the Chinese small-launch companies like Linkspace, Landspace, OneSpace, etc. waiting in the wings. The smallsat launch market will be entering the cutthroat-competition phase when that happens. It would be interesting to see who the survivors are in a couple years.
There are 2 possibly 3 competitors. If somebody buys Stratolaunch, that would be another one in addition to Northrup’s (formerly Orbital’s) L-1011/Pegasus launcher. The final candidate is Virgin Galactic’s White Knight 2. Since it’s also part of the Virgin group, it’s “not really” a competitor but it is a third plane/rocket platform. All three are at the Mojave Airport right now. The question will be if there is enough work for any or all of them. There haven’t been that many Pegasus missions to start with.
Electron is tethered to missions it can launch from it’s land based sites. There is also the small secondary payload opportunities on SpaceX and ULA rockets along with providers from other countries.
I’ve always wondered about how Virgin saw a lucrative niche with their new system.
I think NGIS Pegasus will become non-viable in the very near future. At $45 million per launch (400kg to LEO), Pegasus is simply not competitive against Electron ($6 million / 250kg to LEO) or LauncherOne ($10 million / 300kg to LEO). And Pegasus has been developing a poor reputation for schedule assurance, with NASA’s ICON mission (last one on the Pegasus manifest) delayed for 1.5 years and counting.
Heck, for just $5 million more than what NGIS charges for Pegasus, one can book a launch on a previously-flown SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5, with up to 10,000kg to LEO.
With less expensive options available on the market, I don’t see how Pegasus will survive.
Can we dispense with all the fan-dancing and just launch the thing already?
Dropping something from an aircraft is not the safest thing in the world. It’s best to go no faster in development than it is prudent. If the rocket doesn’t part cleanly from the plane, bad things can happen.
No argument. But it seems that at least one drop of a test article could have been done already just to assure that “wep-sep” actually works. You don’t need a launchable rocket to do that.
What? And risk ruining that paint job?