He designed and built the first privately funded manned vehicle to reach space, SpaceShipOne, in 2004, at a cost of $25 million provided by the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. In the case of Galactic, this enabled crewed flights into suborbital space and of Orbit, for delivering small satellite payloads into orbit.Īir launch was the brainchild of a maverick aeronautical genius, Burt Rutan. That removed the need for huge booster rockets needed to accelerate from ground level to the stratosphere.
Instead of launching from a static pad, the launches were from airborne motherships at heights of 40,000 feet or more. The underlying problem is that Galactic and Orbit shared the same fundamental concept for launching rockets: air launch. (Galactic claims a backlog of 800 “astronauts” waiting to ride at $450,000 a pop). The company was spun-off in 2017 from Virgin Galactic, Branson’s pioneering but costly space tourism project, at the initiative of engineers who saw the new market as a far faster route to profits.Īnd it is that provenance that, with the meltdown of Virgin Orbit, renews the long-simmering question about whether Virgin Galactic, a world leader in deadlines missed, budgets busted and a string of promises never met, will ever get close to delivering the nirvana of space travel for the filthy rich that Branson has relentlessly hyped. Virgin Orbit was an early entrant in the market for micro-launchers, far smaller rockets than those needed for the larger, heavier payloads required by military and commercial satellite networks. military labs and the first satellite built by the Gulf state of Oman. The nine satellites lost included four that were part of advanced programs being run by U.S. It hitched its future prospects for a “gateway to the stars” to Virgin Orbit by approving the mission, named Start Me Up, from a new spaceport in Cornwall, the western peninsular considered ideal for British launches over the Atlantic. The country has never had its own launcher program. 9 mission failure was also an acute embarrassment for the U.K.’s space agency. Now Virgin Orbit has declared bankruptcy, ceased operations, and laid off most of its staff. Within minutes of the failure being livestreamed to the world, the company’s shares lost almost a quarter of their value. The rocket had been launched not from the ground, but from high up over the Atlantic from a converted Boeing 747 jumbo jet bearing the somewhat raffish moniker of Cosmic Girl, operated by Richard Branson’s company Virgin Orbit. Much more was burning up than a lot of expensive rocketry and cargo. It was a rocket with a payload of nine satellites burning up after failing to reach orbit.
Although it looked a lot like a meteor, it wasn’t. 9, a camera on the Canary Islands operated by the Spanish Meteor Network caught a spectacular fireball plunging into the Atlantic Ocean.
0 kommentar(er)
