Royal Air Force Plans to Loan Pilot to Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit
UK Defence Minister Penny Mordaunt announced a plan on Thursday to loan a Royal Air Force test pilot to Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit, apparently so the aviator can earn astronaut wings with Virgin Galactic.
“Virgin Orbit has already pilots with astronaut wings. “It’s currently undertaking pioneering research into launching small satellites into space from the wing of a Boeing 747,” she said in a keynote address to the Air and Space Power Conference 2019 in London.
“Science fiction is becoming science fact. One day I want to see RAF pilots earning their space wings and flying beyond the stratosphere, One day I want to see RAF pilots earning their space wings and flying beyond the stratosphere,” Mordaunt added.
“So today, I can announce we’re making a giant leap in that direction by working towards placing a Test Pilot into the Virgin Orbit programme,” she said. “Sending a bold signal of Global Britain’s aspiration…and showing that if you join our RAF…you will join a service where you can become an aviator or an astronaut…where you will help push back the frontiers of space and create a launch pad to the stars.”
Virgin Orbit is focused on orbiting small satellites using an air-launched booster named LauncherOne. The modified Boeing 747 used in the program does not fly to space.
Virgin Orbit’s sister company, Virgin Galactic, is planning to fly passengers above 50 miles (80.4 km) using the air-launched SpaceShipTwo. The two companies share pilots.
“We are thrilled that, pending US government approvals, a @RoyalAirForce test pilot will be joining our program,” Virgin Orbit tweeted. “The addition of a top-notch pilot will further bolster our excellent team! Thank you, @PennyMordaunt, for your vision and leadership.”
Virgin Orbit’s first test launch is expected later this year from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. The company plans to launch satellites from multiple locations, including Cornwall in England.
16 responses to “Royal Air Force Plans to Loan Pilot to Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit”
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Rule Britannia!
As the Limeys would say “good show”…
I wonder how much longer Virgin Galactic will be in Mojave. With SpaceshipTwo moving to Spaceport America I wonder if LauncherOne will move to England. It would makes sense as there is less competition there, and likely government subsidies.
VG, according to announced plans, still has four more SpaceShipTwos and another WhiteKnight 2 to build/complete so construction of new craft will stay in Mojave for some time. Virgin Orbit has its production facility in Long Beach. I don’t think it would be either easy or sensible to move that to the U.K. Cosmic Girl could, maybe, ferry one or more additional LauncherOnes from the U.S. to the U.K. for launch by carrying them internally, as cargo, in addition to one on the wing. If that isn’t possible, There’s always the AN-124 available for hire. Why one would want to do that is another question entirely as pretty much any desired launch azimuth is possible from a U.S. base. Massive subsidy is about the only reason I can think of that might justify such a move.
Which is just possible given the need England will have to rebuild its pride after Brexit. Also let’s not forget Sir Richard Branson is English, which might be motive enough.
I could see building another SpaceshipTwo to spread the flights around, but not four and there is no need for a second White Knight with only two Spaceship Twos. VG has basically missed the window of opportunity on suborbital space tourism and will likely close down SpaceshipTwo flights after running through their reservations.
Brexit was an exercise in rebuilding British pride. The Brits got tired of being an increasingly put-upon province of the EU being dictated to by smarmy Frogs and Krauts.
The fact that Branson is a Brit certainly has relevance. The fact that he’s a billionaire and quite influential in his home country is likely a bit more relevant. There’s also that knighthood thing.
As for construction plans, I’m just reporting what Branson and Whitesides say they intend to do, namely, build out to a fleet of five SpaceShipTwos and a pair of WhiteKnight 2’s. Your scenario could be the one that actually plays out, but VG projects a total of over 3,000 paying customers by the early 2020’s. That’s about five times VG’s known current waiting list so it’s certainly an ambitious target.
I’ve been quite skeptical of VG for several years, but I have no real rooting interest either way in the outcome other than a general tendency to wish any space-related effort well rather than ill. I’m content to await events and the verdict of history.
Remember that they are doing an IPO so they need to make the numbers look good. I do hope they make it, but their ideas are about 15 years behind the curve of where space commerce seems to be going. It reminds me of the efforts the steam engine manufacturers made to build better steam engines when it was clear the diesel-electric was the future of railroading.
You may turn out to be correct. Or not. I would certainly say your pessimism will get a considerable boost if 2019 passes into history with neither VG nor BO having launched a paying suborbital passenger.
The Brexit referendum was an exercise by David Cameron in trying to keep fringe elements of the Conservative party in line, prevent a loss of votes in a first-past-the-post-system to the rising UKIP party and put the parties neverending identity crisis with the UK’s role within Europe in the cupboard for another decade or so. Heavily monied interests turned an issue that was relatively minor in public consciousness into a debate on hypothetical migration from Turkey, fisheries (.1% British GDP) and returning money to public services (after years of ideologically dictated austerity cuts by the incumbent government). The referendum swung leave on a narrow margin with a definitive split demographically between the under 55’s (remain) and over 55’s (leave). British pride may have been an element of why Brexit won with the electorate, but its hardly the main reason the actual referendum was called.
This monolithic “The Brits” doesn’t exist, and the reason Brexit has become a tortuous dragged on affair is that a wide spectrum of options on the table has narrowly been defined into a binary choice by those hoping to use the rhetoic and polarisation for political and financial gain. There’s a good chunk of Brits who didn’t feel put-upon by the EU, and certainly don’t feel a lot of pride in the path politics has taken since that referendum.
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Apologies for the tangential rant there. As for VG I forsee a pretty good opening for them in the short to medium term. Whilst UK policy favours the eventual development of vertical launch (see Orbex and other smallsat launchers covered more by sites such as rocketeers.co.uk) air launch fills a niche until appropriate facilites can be developed. The lack of production facilites within the UK for VG though suggests that they may only have a limited time as #1 provider for the UK government as launch is increasingly seen as a strategic asset worth developing in country.
In other words, as with Trump’s election here in the U.S., your lot – including Tory “wets” – lost and the howling barbarians won. Brexit was about a lot more than hypothetical Turkish entry into the EU. It was mainly about Britain’s obvious significant loss of sovereignty to the EU, especially in the matter of immigration. With the seriously deranged Angela Merkel allowing millions of military-age male jihadis into the EU as “asylum-seekers” and “refugees,” a majority of Brits figured to slam their own door shut on that particular suicidal idiocy ASAP. As your Aussie cousins like to say, they weren’t wrong.
“All the right sort of people” have spent the intervening three years trying, in various ways, to monkey-wrench the actual cord-cutting process anent the UK and EU or even engineer some sort of Brexit “do-over.” That hasn’t exactly worked out so now it seems, one way or another, Brexit will happen by October. Good.
As for British efforts to, at long last, amount to something in space, I generally agree with your assessment and wish the UK well in its various endeavors toward this end. We can use all the friendly off-planet company we can get.
My bet is Virgin will firmly bridge between the US and whatever becomes of the UK. With the way things are going Branson will likely have to bridge between the US, England, and Scotland.
The U.K. will be fine. The EU is the entity with the iffy future. The Scottish Nationalists are, once again, talking up their own exit from the U.K. and independent re-entry into the EU. This is an old song that keeps getting recycled every few years. But, given that North Sea oil is played out and Scotland is already a welfare case anent the rest of the U.K., it’s hardly obvious the EU would welcome it in. The EU is already over-blessed with economic boat anchors like Greece.
The North Sea Oil running out as deterent to leaving a larger political entity seems an odd card to play given Brexit itself shows economic considerations are easily parried by appeals to nationalism.
Given that the U.K. seems likely to do rather better, economically, once free of EU exactions, I don’t think you are even remotely right about economic considerations being overcome by nationalism in the case of Brexit. It’s hardly obvious that EU membership has been any sort of boon, over the long haul, for the U.K.
The U.K. for example, has had the privilege, if I may so characterize it, of splitting the bill for subsidizing France’s antiquated and inefficient agriculture sector with the Germans. With Britain gone, one can hardly imagine the Germans waxing enthusiastic about covering that whole tab on their own.
That is especially so in view of all the damage to their own economy and standard of living they’ve already subjected themselves to by virtue of going along with the daft Green Party energy “policy” of converting to so-called “renewables” that have made German electricity expensive and failure-prone.
Brexit is just the first of many existential crises that will afflict the EU in coming years.
You’re certainly correct that, in Scotland at least, appeals to nationalism can go quite a ways toward overcoming reality and/or good sense. But every time the Scots actually get to vote on UK-exit, they seem to pull up just short of jumping the fence. If the ScotNats manage to engineer yet another referendum, it will probably go the same way.
At some level, I think the Scots know they would be – literally – redheaded stepchildren anent the EU. They like the security of having the U.K. cover their arrears and overdrafts and, I strongly suspect, know that “The Continent” wouldn’t be the least interested in welcoming in yet another insolvent mendicant polity.
So they get Space Wings from the USA. 80K. I wonder if anyone has told her that the International accepted distance is 100K to get into Space. Or has that changed?
80km or 100km is a largely academic arguement that for all intents and purposes doesn’t really change the experience of the human within the vehicle when taking on a strictly sub-orbital profile.
The bigger question is aside from Public Relations exercise, what value does the UK government see in RAF astronauts, and specifically astronauts flying on VG? I can see this going two ways.
-Either the further development of a civil astronaut corps following the path of Major Tim Peake, with ESA or as a 3rd part participant in Artemis/Gateway?
-Or developing in house experience for piloting in a high altitude/high velocity regieme. This also seems possible given there have also been announcements by the Ministry of Defence regarding increased funding and development for Hypersonic technology with Reaction Engines and Rolls-Royce. (See https://ukdefencejournal.or…