Virgin Orbit confirms that LauncherOne has reached orbit | Hacker News Reader

Virgin Orbit confirms that LauncherOne has reached orbit

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Congrats! The student CubeSat missions are impressive. Low risk, minimal footprint. But high potential for discovery.

Electrodynamic tether project from Michigan especially caught my eye. A thin wire connecting two spacecraft in orbit. When electrified, the current interacts with the Earth's magnetic field to create propellant-free propulsion ;)

http://clasp-research.engin.umich.edu/groups/s3fl/mitee/abou...

This is great news, congratulations to everyone on the team!

We'll cover this in more detail in this week's Orbital Index (https://orbitalindex.com), but the gist is that Virgin Orbit now joins SpaceX and Rocket Lab in the elite club of NewSpace startups that have actually made it to orbit. (Also in this club, albeit likely with significant Chinese military tech transfer, are iSpace and Galactic Energy. And we're ignoring "old space" companies like Arianespace, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and ULA.)

And soon to join will be Astra, who made it very close to orbit recently.

Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit, Astra and SpaceX rideshare are all able to launch 150-500kg into orbit for a few million dollars.

It's hard to see how the market can support so many small launch providers. That's a lot of options for what has been relatively small market. Rocket Lab's Peter Beck has said some of these companies are propped up by the favorable fundraising environment and to expect industry consolidation when the money runs out.

Rocket Lab is obviously in a great financial position with their high launch cadence and improving re-usability technology. And SpaceX is of course in a league of their own.

> It's hard to see how the market can support so many small launch providers.

The small- and tiny-sat market is expected to grow by a factor of four compared to the previous decade [0].

Big launchers like Falcon 9 and especially Starship cannot easily service this market. Ride share has plenty of issues and projected launch costs of $2M for Starship are on the theoretical side of things right now.

SpaceX needs to set aside a considerable amount of their launch capabilities for internal purposes (i.e. Starlink) and with expected double-digit grow rates in the small-sat market, there's plenty of room for competition.

[0] https://smallsatnews.com/2020/07/24/an-analysis-of-prospects...

Yeah, basically if you want a custom orbit and firm launch date (eq. no delays due to other payloads having issues on a rideshare) a dedicated small sat launcher makes sense.

Still I'm thinking Starship once operational could service that as well, being full RLV. Like, just launch with couple tons of cubesats and as much fuel as possible, then deliver then to orbit as needed using you huge delta-v budget then go home. Rinse and repeat. You could theoretically even do inclination changes using the Starship aerodynamic surfaces if you were crazy enough. ;-)

As you are effectively using up just fuel in Starship (+ some wear and tear) it might still be cheaper than dumping a complete small non-reusable rocket.

if theres a reliable cargo rocket ,it could serve as cheap and fast suborbital intercontinental cargo carrier ,which is what SpaceX and Blue Origin have both been hinting at

It's worth noting I-Space [1] and Galactic Energy [2] both mostly use solid fuel, with Galactic Energy's Ceres-1 continuing tradition with a highly-toxic hydrazine stage. Those "new space" companies will struggle to re-use their vehicles with such technologies.

Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit and SpaceX Falcon use keralox (re-usable, with some coking issues), and Blue Origin and SpaceX Raptor uses methalox (cleanly re-usable).

All those providers (except Virgin as far as I know) are pursuing re-usability and SpaceX and Rocket Lab are succeeding at recovering the first stage (with SpaceX far ahead at actually re-using them).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-Space_(Chinese_company)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Energy

> Those "new space" companies will struggle to re-use their vehicles with such technologies.

Do they even need to?

Material cost of solid fuel ICBMs go right into few megabucks each.

Yes, they do. The lowest cost per kg to orbit launch vehicles are not primarily solid.

But if they can get missile cost to $1-2m, which I believe is very realistic, would there still be any big economic benefit from recovery when the launch will still cost few megabucks?

For one its unlike to scale - especially if you are using similar stages as the military, once you reach a certain maximum payload, making a bigger rocket will be much more expensive as you would no longer share the development and production costs of the new stages with the military.

And guided missiles and ICBMs are expensive. In fact, the cheapest large missiles are usually liquid.

But no one has in spite of there being a super strong incentive to do so.

Reuse is taking over the launch market. And for good reason: expendable aerostructures cost basically the same to build as reusable ones, certainly within a factor of 2 or whatever. A cruise missile and a similar dry mass general aviation aircraft cost about the same.

For all the talk about (& investment in) low cost expendables, nobody has made it cheaper. Besides, reusable liquid rockets are easier on the payload (less vibration, etc).

I'm really thrilled to see renewed interest in space, and I hope that we will end up with moon bases and Mars colonies in the near future... Now, the challenge is not to end up with corporate hegemony.

Reminds me of that infamous Fight Club quote:

> When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks. [0]

That aside, does Virgin Orbit have anything to do with Virgin Galactic? I vaguely remember Chamath talking about Virgin Galactic's commercial market opportunities when shilling his SPAC, but nothing directly about Virgin Orbit.

[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Va2K__8rV3o

Based on the wikipedia page it looks like Virgin Orbit is it's own separate private company held by the Virgin Group. It was spun off of Galactic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Orbit

> Now Virgin Galactic officials have decided to break off the satellite launcher program and make it its own company. Called Virgin Orbit, the California-based firm is seeking to enter a market that has attracted a lot of interest in recent years as satellites, once huge and expensive, have shrunk in size and cost.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/02...

Hmm, interesting. I wonder why they spun it off — doesn't seem to make sense from Galactic's POV. Leadership dispute?

Galactic's mission is essentially unrelated to space, beyond providing a short peek at it. Sending a plane up to the edge of space for a brief period with passengers aboard barely overlaps what's needed to put anything in orbit. It makes sense that they'd be different companies.

Not to mention Virgin Orbit actually doing something useful after lot less time and likely money invested.

Virgin Galactic has been working on their sub-orbital rocketplane since 2004 and they have yet to fly any paying customers. For something that should have been "just like Space Ship One but bigger" it has been taking ages and might not make much sense if they ever get it working (eq. you might as well buy a seat on a proper commercial Dragon orbital flight).

Yeah. I've always been a big Virgin Galactic skeptic. It seemed like a sort of a stunt from the beginning. "Dangerous joyrides which briefly reach the edge of space" might appeal to some people, but is otherwise a spectacularly useless and ridiculously expensive activity.

It mainly seems to be a sort of playground for (originally) Bert Rutan to inadvertently prove that his ideas about planes and low-tech systems don't really translate to this sort of application. Nice work if you can get it, maybe.

Thank you for attending my TED rant.

They’re separate entities with very different missions.

LauncherOne costs $12 millions per launch and delivers 300 kg, which means $40k/kg. Compared to $4k/kg of Falcon9, this is... uhm... They definitely gotta optimize things

The difference is that you can “afford” to buy the whole launch and get to your desired orbit instead of doing a ride share and ending up wherever the main payload was headed.

I don't think they're competitive with Rocket Lab, which is half the price and could be even lower.

Makes me wonder if there could be a business opportunity in providing "the model T" of ion drives for rideshare payloads if that doesn't already exist.

Even a ion drive will not help you if you need substantially different inclination.

Also it will need quite substantial solar panels, that add considerable drag, which is doble problematic on these relatively low orbits.

SpaceX, Rocket Lab and Virgin Orbit have now all reached orbit.

But Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin hasn't yet. We'll see if their Gradatim Ferociter (Step by Step, Ferociously) approach pays off in the longer term.

Bezos is just letting everyone else spend money on the R&D and he'll copy whatever works best

He's spending 1B$/year and BO's approaches are reasonably novel.

You're probably thinking of Amazon's house brand approach, which is funny to imagine in this context.

> You're probably thinking of Amazon's house brand approach, which is funny to imagine in this context.

That's the joke =p

If this launcher can put a metric ton into orbit, why does Virgin Galactic and the White Knight launch platform, which can only boost 100kg to orbit, need to exist at all?

I'm not sure it does anymore? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LauncherOne, White Knight Two was originally proposed to launch LauncherOne rockets, but then in 2015 this was changed to a 747, to carry a heavier rocket. The White Knight Two derivative by Stratolaunch is much bigger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_Composites_Stratolaunch).

Amazing!

I’m very happy for them. The more competition we have in this space, the better. (pardon the pun)

Seems like they would want to launch higher than 35000 if they can since that would require less fuel for the rocket which seems like that is at least part of the point.

IIRC higher launching aircraft altitude and velocity don't help that much (at least in what you can achieve with a non-exotic carrier aircraft).

The main benefit is huge flexibility in launch azimuth and conditions (as you can just fly the plane to the best spot to reach the target orbit) and the lack of upkeep for a spaceport. You might even be able to work around bad weather by having multiple drop-zones ready.

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