I am just happy Mike C is back on BT. Maybe 2021 will be better after all!

From the same guy that designed Evel Knievel's Skycycle X2 (Snake River jump)

It looks like they are using the 5th engine mount location on the 747 for the rocket mounting.

Vince

I have good friends, and previous coworkers that started at VO when the company started in a small office in Pasadena in 2013 and we have kept in touch. It's been a long process and a great accomplishment. Designed from the ground up. Impressive amount of work they had to overcome for even for what we think are simple things. The Long Beach facility, manufacturing and Galaxy Gal.

Being airborne launched and liquid fueled are the some of the advantages for them, it opens some logistics and ranges they can use.

I happened to be airborne, on the way to AVX, and knew OBT1 was also airborne and saw LauncherOne accelerating and heading up. So I knew the first stage was off. Texted later to get the result.

Me too!
...even if he shoots down my jokes!

This might out dumb them all:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)


Sink your rocket into the ocean to launch it. What could go wrong with that?

There was also an attempt to us an electromagnetic rail gun to accomplish this.

Dear Lord NO!

You can't blow up satellites in orbit without producing clouds of debris that will likely destroy multiple satellites in nearby orbits, with a cascade effect that could go on to a catastrophic end. Space debris has to be avoided at almost all costs, deliberately creating it is inconceivable.

Fair enough, and no worries.

Removing them will take some financial willpower.

You've got to launch a dedicated vehicle that's not only powerful enough to get itself up there in the first place, but bigger and more powerful still to have the muscle to slow itself down and the mass of the dud satellite too, and then to do it with enough certainty that the whole tug and tow will reliably crash in an unpopulated part of the globe.

If the retriever is barely powerful enough that it drops the orbit just so that the upper wisps of the atmosphere tickle the object and we wait patiently for the cumulative effects of aerodynamic drag, then the whole thing end up coming down just about anywhere.

You're right though- the alternative is having more and more stuff up there. That'll get dangerous and expensive!



(Orbital mechanics is a funny thing. When you fire retro rockets aimed 180 out from your flight path, the vehicle loses energy and drops to a lower orbit, but the velocity counterintuitively increases because it's now in a lower orbit... so you sort of slow down but you go faster too.)

Congrats to Virgin Orbit, again.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/v ... t-n1272715

Very cool, and as a shareholder, very exciting.

Interesting that they stated the versatility that using a 747 gives them a large number of launch sites.

Smart.

From the same guy that designed Evel Knievel's Skycycle X2 (Snake River jump)

Air launched orbital rockets have some very nice advantages when payload sizes are small. I think is a promising technology in general, but don't know anything about this particular implementation.

Josef: I think you have to look at their mission statement and why they think using small satellites in the future makes sense, especially to deploy them in large numbers in a quick timeframe.

https://virginorbit.com/

Yeah, by those international good citizens, the Chinese.