Virgin Orbit’s Cosmic Girl 747 Conducts Taxi Test with Launcher One
Virgin Orbit’s Cosmic Girl 747 aircraft conducted a low-speed taxi test down runway 12-30 at the Mojave Air and Space Port on Thursday afternoon.
The aircraft taxied down the runway, turned around and returned. The Boeing 747 was then towed back to a concrete pad where it has sat for the last several weeks undergoing preparations for a taxi test and captive carry flight.
Virgin Orbit has said that it needed to do a taxi test with a full fueled LauncherOne prior to doing a captive carry flight. It is not clear whether the booster was fueled. However, a hazardous operations notice to airmen (NOTAM) was not posted prior to the taxi test.
LauncherOne is designed to orbit small satellites by air launching them over the ocean. A flight test of the booster is scheduled for later this year.
The aircraft and booster require a significant amount of support equipment as seen in the photo above.
13 responses to “Virgin Orbit’s Cosmic Girl 747 Conducts Taxi Test with Launcher One”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
go go go
I think this one will work. And work well.
You may well be right.
But it would be nice if it did so before all of us are one with the beers of yesteryear.
This program is going at a realistic pace. It seems realistic to believe that they’ll launch this year. Whatever’s going on with SpaceShip 2 does not seem to be passing on to this project. Now if they come close to flying and then start delaying again and again and again …. Then we’ll know.
Why not? All they are doing is what Pegasus did thirty years ago. Even the payload available is not that much different. The only real difference is that Orbital Sciences did it in 3 years while it’s taken VG 12 years since they started work on it in 2007.
It’s not what Orbital did 30 years ago, and you know it. Most of what made up Pegasus were already functional solids for various uses. As for where’s the market for 500 kg to LEO via airlaunch? All the new boosters are suffering from lack of payloads. Will this system fare better than Pegasus? Who knows. Lots of reasons to make popcorn these days.
you know better then that
Really? And just exactly what is so radically different? It is because they are using a surplus B747 because surplus L1011s, if there are any even left, are too hard to keep flying? Original plans to use the White Knight Two of course had to be dropped when the rocket got too heavy for it to lift.
Or is it radically different because they decided to use a new rocket as the surplus solid motors used for Pegasus are also difficult to procure these days? RP1/Lox engines have been around for a while (indeed RP1 stands for Rocket Propellent 1) so it’s difficult to see why it took them 12 years to develop it, especially as its expendable. Funny how they ditched the hybrid engines they bragged about as being so great for SpaceshipTwo to return to the old standby of RP1/Lox which has been used since the 1950’s (Atlas, Titan).
Now if they had decided to go with a hybrid I would be more impressed, but I guess they learned their lesson on SpaceshipTwo.
As for cost, we will see if they hit their targets, but I would expect the cost to come down when you are just improving on what someone did before. But I would not call $40,000 kg to polar orbit that much an improvement over the $60,000 kg for Pegasus polar orbit launches. We will see if it’s able to compete against the ground launched systems already flying.
Maybe they’re moving at a realistic pace – for certain values of “realistic.”
Or maybe, as I rather suspect, they’ve just contracted a serious case of the yips.
Noodling around re-doing things they’ve been doing for two or three years argues more for a lack of nerve than anything else – always assuming there aren’t actually some secret technical gotchas that none of we outsiders know about.
But I’m still quite a bit less inclined to believe that than I am to believe it’s just a corporate case of the vapors.
I do as well…
Say it louder, Bob. I don’t think they can hear you.
the new US AST
Props to Kenneth Brown for the candid photos by the way – his “show” to your “tell.”