Virgin Orbit has just completed its fourth consecutive mission, launching seven small satellites on the company’s first-ever night flight.
Virgin Orbit’s carrier plane, a modified Boeing 747 called Cosmic Girl, took off from Mojave Air and Space Port in Southern California on Saturday, July 2, at 1:49 a.m. EDT (0549 GMT; 2249 local time) with the company LauncherOne rocket hidden under a wing.
Cosmic Girl headed west and then southwest, eventually reaching a targeted area west of the Channel Islands. The plane dropped LauncherOne at 02:53 a.m. EDT (06:53 GMT), at an elevation of approximately 35,000 feet (10,700 meters). Seconds later, the 70-foot-long (21 m) rocket ignited its first-stage NewtonThree engine, beginning to orbit.
In picture : Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket for satellite missions
There you go, friends! We just learned from Mission Control that *ahem* NewtonFour has successfully re-ignited and deployed all client spacecraft to their target orbit. 👏July 2, 2022
This burn lasted three minutes. Shortly after, the two stages of the rocket separated and the upper stage NewtonFour engine ignited. The NewtonFour blazed for a total of six minutes on two separate burns, taking the seven payloads to the desired orbit, a circular trajectory 310 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth. All seven satellites were successfully deployed there as planned, pristine orbit representatives said via Twitter (opens in a new tab) at 03:56 a.m. EDT (07:56 GMT).
It was the fourth consecutive successful launch for Virgin Orbit, following satellite missions in January 2021, June 2021 and January of this year. The company attempted five launches in total; its first effort, a test flight in May 2020, ended in failure.
Saturday’s mission was the first night launch from Virgin Orbit, part of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. The company didn’t have to operate in obscurity this time around, but wanted to gain experience in this area.
Virgin Orbit wanted to “expand the envelope and just get into operations for night missions because we have some on our books that are needed,” CEO Dan Hart said in a pre-launch call with reporters. Tuesday (June 28). “We want to make sure we do them first in our backyard here in Mojave.”
All five of Virgin Orbit’s takeoffs to date have come from Mojave Air and Spaceport, but, as this commentary suggests, the company plans to start launching from other locations soon. Indeed, Virgin Orbit is preparing for a launch from Spaceport Cornwall in England. The mission, which will be the UK’s first-ever orbital effort, is set to lift off around September, Hart said.
The seven satellites that went up on Saturday morning were very varied. One of them, the shoebox-sized Adler-1, will study the space debris environment to help improve researchers’ models. This small satellite will be operated by Virginia-based company Spire Global.
The Polish company SatRevolution provided two spacecraft, called Stork-3 and SteamSat-2. Stork-3 will join SatRevolution’s Stork constellation of Earth-imaging satellites, while SteamSat-2 will test water-powered thrusters developed by British company SteamJet Space Systems.
Two other spaceships are tiny cubesats manifest via NASA’s Educational Nanosatellite Launch Program, or ELaNa. One was developed by NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia and the other by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The last payloads that flew on Saturday were research and development satellites sponsored by the US Department of Defense. They will conduct space communication and navigation experiments in space, Virgin Orbit representatives said.
Virgin Orbit named Saturday’s mission “Straight Up,” after the chart-topping song from Paula Abdul’s 1988 album “Forever Your Girl.” This album was released by Virgin Records, another member of the Virgin group.
This nomenclature seems to be a tradition now, as the previous two Virgin Orbit launches were also named after songs on Virgin Records releases. The January 2022 mission, for example, was called “Above the Clouds,” after a song from Gang Star’s 1998 album “Moment of Truth.”
And the June 2021 flight, “Tubular Bells Part 1”, shares its moniker with the opening track from Mike Oldfield’s 1973 album “Tubular Bells”, which was the first album Virgin had ever released. (You probably know this song best as the theme song to the 1973 movie “The Exorcist.”)
The Space Tourism Company Galactic Virgo is also part of the Virgin group and, like Virgin Orbit, it uses an air launch strategy. Virgin Orbit officials cite this strategy as a key benefit, saying the air launch gives customers more flexibility and responsiveness than they can get from traditional vertically launched rockets.
“Straight Up” was originally scheduled to launch on Thursday morning (June 30), but Virgin Orbit pulled out of that attempt after noticing LauncherOne thruster temperatures were slightly abnormal.
Mike Wall is the author of “The low (opens in a new tab)(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for extraterrestrial life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall (opens in a new tab). Follow us on twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in a new tab) Or on Facebook (opens in a new tab).
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