Virgin out of orbit – Vedomosti

Richard Branson’s space company Virgin Orbit has failed the first ever space launch from the UK. On January 10, a modified Boeing 747 took off from Newquay Airport in Cornwall. An hour and a half later, he successfully launched a 21-meter LauncherOne space rocket carrying nine mini-satellites and calmly returned to the airfield. But the rocket never reached space due to some “anomaly”. It either burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere, or fell apart over the North Atlantic.

Prior to that, it had already successfully delivered satellites to an orbit of about 500 km four times: in January and June 2021 and in January and July 2022. Then the plane took off from the United States, from the Mojave cosmodrome.