Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit has completed a successful drop test of its LauncherOne rocket from its “flying launch pad”
Yesterday, Wednesday July 11 at 8.43 A.M. Pacific Time, the company’s Cosmic Girl plane – a modified Boeing 747 – took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, California with the LauncherOne rocket under its wing. About 30 minutes later, the rocket was dropped over a testing range at Edwards Air Force Base.
In November 2018, Virgin Orbit – a sister company to the space tourism-focused Virgin Galactic – drove the planewith the rocket attached for the first time. Soon after, it flew with the rocket under its wing in a series of flight tests, to check how the plane performed while carrying the rocket. , it was simply dropped to Earth. The goal of the test was to see how the rocket and plane behaved in the few seconds after release, and to see how the rocket fell.“Today’s test was a monumental step forward for us,” Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart said in a statement. “I’m extremely proud of the team for getting us to this point, and for their spectacular performance today. I’ve told them to take a few hours now to celebrate — our first launch campaign begins in the morning.
This type of launch is known as an air launch, and it has been done before – notably by Northrop Grumman’s. But Virgin Orbit is hoping that, at $12 million per launch, they will be able to grab a chunk of the emerging smallsat launcher market that other companies like Rocket Lab are already operating in.
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