Virgin orbit’s test flight ended in failure shortly after LauncherOne dropped from under the company’s carrier 747 airplane. The launch was successful and the rocket’s main engine ignited. The team will be digging into the data to learn what went wrong.

This week, we tackled the biggest technical risk of the program. Today, we addressed the biggest risk of learning, but that is huge! ! !. I’ll go to bed tonight smarter than I was when I woke up up.

Virgin orbit is the sister company to Richard Branson’s space tourism venture. The company has been developing and testing its vehicles for the last six years. Now it’s ready to launch its rocket today.

Virgin orbit’s primary rocket is called LauncherOne, capable of launching small to medium payloads, roughly the size of washing machines, to space. Launcherone is designed to carry LauncherOne up to 35,000 feet. There, the plane pulls up, angling the rocket toward the sky, and then LauncherOne drops away.

Virgin orbit CEO Dan Hart says we’re a very unique system in that we are air launched.’we have mobility; we can fly to space from any place that can host a 747, which is almost any place, and we can go to any orbit,’ Hart said.

Virgin orbit engineers have conducted numerous ignition tests with LauncherOne’s engine, called newtonthree, at the company’s test facility at the Mojave air and space port. The company has done a fair amount of testing on all of the hardware to make it happen.

Virgin orbit has carried the rocket underneath the wing of cosmic girl a few times. The team even dropped a dummy LauncherOne from the plane to see if the rocket fell as they expected.

The company had hoped to fly LauncherOne as early as last summer, but the team wound up doing more work to develop the rocket. The covid-19 pandemic forced the company to pause operations briefly this year.

Launcherone is loaded up with a dummy payload that the company has treated it like an actual customer’s satellite. Virgin orbit vice president will Pomerantz said it is essentially a nice-looking inert mass that allowed us to practice all those things we really wanted to practice.

latimer will take off from the Mojave air and space port with LauncherOne. She’ll then fly cosmic girl out over the Pacific and position the plane over the rocket’s drop point. A few seconds later, the engines should ignite and start LauncherOne’s trip to space.

Virgin orbit is prepared to learn from this flight and is realistic about the possibility of something going wrong. About half of inaugural launches of new rockets fail.

Nasa launches up to 10 small satellites on a mission called Elana XX. That should be one of a handful that Virgin orbit does this year.

Virgin orbit will become one of just a handful of us companies with an operational rocket dedicated to launching small payloads into orbit. The company has a lot of competition coming up quick, with numerous startups developing similar types of launch vehicles to capitalize on the small satellite revolution.

Virgin orbit claims to have customer contracts that add up to hundreds of millions of dollars of dollars. The company also set its pre-launch price for rides on LauncherOne at $ 12 million.