Capital crunch: Virgin Orbit confirms all ops on pause until Tuesday Virgin Orbit has hit the pause button on the business to "conserve capital" while it seeks funding and explores strategic opportunities. The rocket-building biz, which only began commercial launch operations in 2021, said this morning in an SEC filing it was in "discussions with potential funding sources" and looking at …
Did regulatory delays cause the launch to fail ?
No.
Did launch fail cost Virgin Orbit income?
Probably
Were they leaking money like no tomorrow anyway?
Possibly
Did regulatory delays cause Virgin Orbit's cash flow to become marginal
Possibly
Was the recent launch all about putting on a "good show " in front of Brits to get funding
?
It's a US rocket that attempted to begin its journey to orbit from a UK runway.
In other words, launching the zero stage from Cornwall was just a stunt.
Black Arrow was a British rocket that achieved orbit from an Australian launch site. That was a genuine effort by Westland and others.
There were only five lauches of Black Arrow, with two successes. The final lauch carried Prospero, which is still in orbit. More successful then Europa, with it's Blue Streak (British), Coralie (French), Astris (German) and Italian payload. A wonderful example of international co-operation. When I lived in Australia, a documentary was on TV, which explained the failure of Europa. Scientists from each country spoke their own language and translating technical information from one language to another was never going to be ideal.
I remember the launches from Woomera very well. Two of my uncles worked on the Bulgunnia Station, which was inside the Woomera prohibited area. Each station had underground shelters the workers were supposed to sit in when a launch was scheduled. They sat on the roof instead to watch the firework display!
Colour me completely unsuprised that a civil aviation administrator operates in a (small-C) conservative, risk averse manner. Given that we don't have an easy several thousand km of sea East of us to soak up prograde launch failures without too much trouble, and that airspace access has to be co-ordinated with multiple countries, I honestly think the CAA has done its job pretty well. Still, moaning about the local regulator works for SpaceX so why not everyone else too; Space Forge knowingly put all its eggs in VO's basket despite it being an essentially unproven launch option - increased rapid uplanned disassembly risk is therefore part of what they had to have accepted prior to launch.
Personally, I can't wait for Orbex and especially Skyrora to get their act together. The engine powering the latter's XL has much more successor-to-Black-Arrow feel about it; though if you want some John Scott-Scott love*, his influence lives on through Reaction Engines Ltd and the Skylon spaceplane.
* as a boy Scott-Scott carried bell jars of peroxide home on the school bus to build model rocket engines using bic biro tubes as injectors - when he joined Armstrong-Siddeley's rocket dept they worried there had been a security leak. He was part of the Black Arrow brains trust. What we could have had if people like him had been allowed to achieve their potential.
But you do have several thousand miles of sea to the west of Newquay. It’s called the Atlantic Ocean.
Thoughts
- Branson should put some more money into this, or be better (like Musk) at snagging State subsidies/loans
- Employees being ‘furloughed’ (without pay) is a worrying post-pandemic Americanisation of this. Back to point 1, Branson needs to put his hands in his pockets. His very deep pockets.
Earth rotates from West to East, Launching Eastwards, you have that rotational velocity working for you, Launching Westward you'll need extra fuel to first remove that velocity* and then more to add it in the other direction.
* Bringing the rocket to a dead stop relative to Earths centre of gravity. Standing still at the equator, you're rotating Eastward with the Earth at 1,000mph.
Launching from the UK makes sense for polar orbits since there is a lot of ocean directly north for stages or aborts to "land". The EU might get upset about the eastward launches.
As others have said westward launches are very inefficient but they might make for some spectacular satellite collisions (differential velocity > 50,000 km/hr) as orbital space get more crowded.
To get best advantage from the Earth's spin you want to go east. That is less important for polar and sun synchronous orbits where the best choices are northeast or southeast. Only Israel launches west, and only because dropping spent rocket stages to their east would be problematic.
Virgin Orbit could fly a long way west from Cornwall so the rocket could then launch east but as they have some flexibility in selecting the takeoff site it would be easier to just pick a suitable start point.
Rockets fail, and usually require multiple runs to figure out the engineering. If Branson is serious about make-it-happen, he'll get his chequebook out. Prospective users of launch systems aren't going to want to gamble on un-proven tech when they can get a cheap launch on reliable hardware elsewhere.
Falcon 1's "first" successful flight was also the difference between life and death of SpaceX. As I understand it, had they not got through that would have folded.
Unlike Black Arrow, we don't have a proven UK space capability being cancelled.
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