This morning Virgin Orbit is attempting their third flight of the LauncherOne air-launched vehicle. This will be the first operational flight of the vehicle after their successful Demo-2 mission in January.
Date: Wednesday, June 30th, 10:47 a.m. EDT (Drop and Launch)
Virgin Orbit has become one of the newest launch providers to come online with the success of their Demo 2 launch earlier this year. Now their first operational mission is nearing launch readiness by the end of this month.
In a press release Wednesday, Virgin Orbit announced that they were selected by geospatial analytics company Hypersat, and QinetiQ, a defense and security company, to launch 6 hyperspectral satellites into low earth orbit.
Virgin Orbit attempted its second demonstration launch on Sunday after their first attempt failed shortly after the first stage ignition last year. This time around they didn’t just launch a mass simulator but actual payloads from NASA’s Educational Launch of Nanosatellites program ElaNa 20 which contained several CubeSats from universities across the nation.
Virgin Orbit is developing a launch system that can deploy small rockets from anywhere on the planet, but the spread of COVID-19 continues to affect the pace of progress.
After the first Demo Mission of its LauncherOne air launch system ended in the ocean rather than orbit, Virgin Orbit plans to launch Demo Mission 2 on December 19. This will be its second-ever launch attempt, and this time, it will be adding customer payloads to the top of the rocket.
Virgin Orbit will return to flight as soon as late 2020 with a second demonstration mission aimed at dropping a space-bound LauncherOne rocket from the wing of a 747 plane named Cosmic Girl. The second orbital flight test will include NASA payload this time with 11 small satellites onboard for deployment.
