That is sad. I thought the idea of using a 747 as a glorified first stage (or stage 0) was sound as it saved a ton of money.
I wonder why they couldn't make it work. And why does a single failure doom a company after 4 successful launches.
I wonder why they couldn't make it work. And why does a single failure doom a company after 4 successful launches.
The complexity and cost of a 747 carrying a rocket up for an additional maybe ~3% of orbital velocity just doesn't pencil out in the end
And reusable boosters sway the calculus even further toward ground-based launches, both in cost and launch system simplification.
You can instead of using that 747 with more optimized aircraft for this purpose. And you can make the boosters reusable. Stratolaunch was on a good path long term but ran out of cash.
The dilemma with VO's approach was the same as OSC, thinking that reusing parts made for something else is cheaper short term and long term, where in fact more $ short and long. Yes the carrier was too expensive to maintain and material tech wasn't there yet to stop boil on the upper stages during staging. But the tradeoff was you can launch (nearly) anywhere, anytime, but regs/politics killed that benefit. I think we had potentially 8 locations at one point, ended up with 3. And thus, here we are. Sad VO couldn't keep the idea innovating.
Want to launch from say Israel, currently you can only launch retrograde (to the west), as you can't launch over land (especially countries with questionable friendliness)
You could in theory launch via Virgin One, fly south along the red sea and then launch over the Indian Ocean
Same with launches from the West Coast US -- want to launch Polar, that's fine, you can launch south out of LA (and that's what they do). You can't launch East though, you have to move the rocket from California to Florida to launch.
You don't need to worry much about bad weather at the launch site either. Got rain and lightning in Florida? Unless it's really bad you can still take off in a plane, then launch from above or away from that bad weather
It's similar to why launching from a mountain top isn't worth it. If you're launching to a few hundred km altitude, a 2km or even a 10km head start is peanuts. And altitude is only a small fraction of the problem, compared to orbital speeds large jet aircraft are barely even moving.
If you're launching anti-satelite missiles that's different. Getting altitude is the main aim, and military jets can get reasonably high with a small missile as payload.
And he didn't even address the reentry questions, both of which are actually plausible - if you somehow have the fuel to drastically reduce your orbital velocity, you're suddenly no different than a sounding rocket, indeed not needing a heat shield. And if you cleverly slow down your reentry over many orbits, it can be very gentle.
There's a reason why air launch has more or less died as an idea. The theoretical savings don't typically manifest once the additional complexities are accounted for.
It cost a HUGE amount of money. The reason is that in the plane you have people, so the rocket design has to take that into account and validating the rocket costs more. Just for reference, SpaceX and RocketLab sent their rocket to space for under 100M, while Virgin spend like 500M. That's partly because of worse leadership, but its partly inherent.
A plane also isn't cheap, a ground launch station for a small rocket isn't that expensive.
Additionally engineering the rocket to get carried vertically adds structure, that cost money and lowers payload. You end up not gaining that much from air-launch. It also makes the structure and avionics quite complex.
Once you drop the rocket, the engine has to start or the payload is gone. Other rockets can start the engine, verify its good and then launch. Relativity space just did that.
It also puts huge constraints on your rockets, the size in both weight and volume is inherently limited, and you can't evolve the architecture. In comparison SpaceX Falcon 1 could have easily been slightly upgraded and turned into a rocket that could lift 1T+ and even more eventually. And then they managed to use that engine to build a Falcon 9.
Virgin Orbit has this one rocket, and its impossible to make back 100s of millions of investment with a tiny rocket and low launch cadence. They can't make the rocket significantly bigger because of the limits of the plane.
I thought it was impossible for them to ever be a real company and that seem to have ended up happening. Launch is a really tough business.
> And why does a single failure doom a company after 4 successful launches.
Because they have already burned down a gigantic amount of cash and were in a bad stage, launch success or not. A launch earns them 12M or so. That basically nothing considering their investments and their burn.
Is that really true? If it is, I am struggling to understand what the money is being spent on. I mean the cost of Space Shuttle launches was in that neighborhood.
Its mostly just lots of people and time. Plus buying 1-2 planes.
Space Shuttle development was of course way more. A single margin launch cost 500M. But with fixed cost it was 1 billion+.
Isn't "launch from a plane" basically reusable first stage, 1.0? It was also more conservative, since the idea had already been successfully implemented in 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_Pegasus.
Some quick googling shows Virgin Orbit started in 2011, and SpaceX landed their first rocket in 2015. Virgin Orbit's idea may have make a lot more sense before SpaceX proved out an alternative, and that didn't happen until maybe they'd done a lot of development that could have possibly paid off.
SpaceX landed a rocket in 2015, but Virgin Orbit wasn't even competitive with Falcon 1. Landing rockets has little to do with why it wasn't working out.
Yes without Falcon 9 the market would be quite a bit bigger, but even then its hard to see how VO ever gets very far. Its offering even compared to the other small launch competition isn't really competitive. Their offering was 12M for a tiny payload, their competition was often less then 10M for payloads with more flexibility in size and volume.
They simply have no migration path, no way to make their vehicle bigger, and pretty much every small launch company has realized that small launch isn't really a business you want to be in.
They managed to get a lot of financing pretty early on and managed to be one of the first to orbit, but their financial outlook was always pretty bad.
Their launch volume has been trending down though. I don't think they're able to effectively compete for most contracts.
Edit: Really it's a potential energy to cost problem. 5% more efficiency is [actually] big when leaving this planet, but yes, cost of air launch is still stuck in 1990 times. From the outside I didn't see any innovation from the VO team aside from electronics. As for VG, I used to work with their new CEO and Eng VP: they know ops, but I thought the systems/tech hadn't been flush out 100%, so may have the similar fate if a few customers start canceling. I have some ideas to 'fix' air launch requiring big R&D, but knee deep in fixing autonomous drones!
Peg was not financially successful cause prior 2002, the space race was maybe 15 launches a year: not profitable. Stuff like Iridium failed, shutting down ideas of having thousands of sats in LEO, mind that the only markets were communications (cellular/fiber won), science experiments, and imaging (imaging/remote sensing? Drone tech will eventually win). Luckily LEO payloads are a cool idea again-- tech is better + moore's law, thus demand is HOT. Heck Orbcomm is up there today, but old tech no one really wants.
Today, Elon played the long game (2002) and kept innovating where SpaceX has found the cost-benefit balance via reusability, and [with timing] being the only system post Shuttle it's a duopoly with ULA--charge as much to stay in the black. BUT the markets are still the 3 above, nothing new (Elon's Mars thing == passion project) though every country now wants their 'own constellation' cause of the NRO, hehe.
Trivia Edit: Peg's GNC computer was an 80386SX :)
"This one failure killed it" is a poplar story. See also Zeppelins being doomed by the Hindenburg disaster, and the Concorde being doomed by an exploding tire. Failures can be the straw that breaks the camel's back, but saying they are the reason for killing their product is only true in the technical sense.
I think Virgins space ventures are all pretty much dead in the water, similar the space plane it’s just outdated and outmatched by the competition.
The only customer needing an asset in orbit regardless of a weather violation is the military. The other bonus would be spreading out launch locations to essentially any airport rather than a few launch locations that could be denied by enemies.
However their desire for it hasn’t been enough to fund it. Even Astra (with a similar launch anywhere, whenever premise) hasn’t been robustly funded by the US military.