NEWCASTLE, UNITED KINGDOM — The first-ever orbital mission to launch from the United Kingdom is not going according to plan.
This flight, Virgin Orbit’s “Start Me Up” mission, started well enough. The company’s launch vehicle, known as Cosmic Girl, lifted off from the Cornwall Spaceport here on schedule on Monday (January 9) at 17:02 EST (2202 GMT).
Cosmic Girl drops Virgin Orbit 70 feet (21 meters) long LauncherOne missile at 18:09 EST (2309 GMT) while the plane was off the southwest coast of Ireland. The rocket’s first stage did its job, and LauncherOne’s two stages separated as planned about 3.5 minutes after impact.
The rocket’s upper stage completed a nearly five-minute burn shortly thereafter, then went into a long coast. During this phase we learned that something had gone wrong.
“It appears that LauncherOne has suffered an anomaly that will prevent us from orbiting this mission,” Virgin Orbit’s Chris Relph, director of systems engineering and verification, said during a mission webcast. Details were not immediately available.
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Virgin Orbit’s Boeing 747 Cosmic Girl lifts off with the LauncherOne rocket under its wing on January 9, 2023, launching the Start Me Up mission from Cornwall Spaceport in the United Kingdom. The mission failed to reach orbit. (Image: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images)
The failure resulted in the loss of nine satellites. These payloads are an in-orbit manufacturing experiment by British company Space Forge; several UK defense cube satellites, including two to study the ionosphere, the upper layer of the Earth’s atmosphere where space weather occurs; and an experimental global navigation satellite co-funded by the European Space Agency.
“Start Me Up,” which took its name from the famous 1981 Rolling Stones song, was an important mission for Virgin Orbit. All five of the company’s previous orbital flights originated from the Mojave Air and Space Port in southeastern California, so Start Me Up opened a new chapter for the company’s startup.
At a pre-launch press conference on Sunday (January 8), Virgin Orbit chief executive Dan Hart said the company could return to Spaceport Cornwall later this year and was also looking at other locations around the world.
“We’re excited about the future and coming back, maybe later this year, to start again and hopefully start a rhythm,” Hart said. “We want to be part of the fabric of the space community here in the UK as well as globally. That’s our goal as a company.”
Start Me Up was also a very big deal for the UK. Tickets to watch Cosmic Girl lift off from Cornwall Spaceport, also known as Newquay Airport, sold out faster than those for the UK’s iconic Glastonbury music festival, according to Ian Annett, deputy chief executive of the British Space Agency.
Space geeks from England’s south-west Cornwall region and beyond braved the cold to witness the historic moment, despite occasional showers and gusty winds that made the venue’s 48 degrees Fahrenheit (9 degrees Celsius) temperatures even more low.
They didn’t get to witness the rocket fall, but they did see the Space Girl return safely to the airport.
The UK announced plans to develop infrastructure to launch small satellites in 2014 in the hope of increasing its share of the global space market. The country is home to some leading manufacturers of small satellites, including Airbus, Surrey Satellite Technology and Clyde Space. Before Start Me Up, these satellites had to be sent elsewhere for launch.
“The space industry is worth around £6.5 billion [$7.7 billion] per annum for the UK economy,” Annette said at the pre-launch press conference on Sunday.
“As a country, we build more satellites than anywhere else outside the United States,” he said. “So it helps develop an end-to-end capability so we can do everything.”
According to Melissa Thorpe, chief executive of Spaceport Cornwall, it cost £20 million ($24 million) to convert the small Newquay airport into a space-ready site. A total of seven sites received funding from the UK Space Agency in 2017 to help with space-focused upgrades.
Two other objects are currently in the final stages of preparation for launch into space: SpaceHub Sutherland in the north of Scotland and SaxaVord Cosmodrome in the Shetland Islands off the Scottish coast. Both spaceports will serve vertical launches of microrockets and hope to see their first launches later this year.
Virgin Orbit had a streak of four consecutive launch successes to date. These four missions put 33 satellites into orbit for various customers.
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