An attempt to make British space history by launching a rocket into orbit from UK soil has ended in failure after suffering an “anomaly” during the flight.
After taking off from Cornwall, the Virgin Orbit plane flew to 35,000ft over the Atlantic Ocean where it jettisoned the rocket containing nine small satellites towards space. Organisers of the Start Me Up mission said the rocket – with a variety of civil and defence applications – failed to orbit.
In a series of tweets, Virgin Orbit said: “We appear to have an anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit. We are evaluating the information. As we find out more, we’re removing our previous tweet about reaching orbit. We’ll share more info when we can.”
While engineers tried to establish what went wrong, the plane returned to Spaceport Cornwall safely.
The plane, dubbed Cosmic Girl, took off on Monday night from Cornwall Airport with hundreds of members of the public watching and over 75,000 viewing a live stream of the event. Named in tribute to the Rolling Stones’ 1981 hit, the mission involved a repurposed Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 aircraft and Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket.
It was originally hoped the launch could take place before Christmas but owing to technical and regulatory issues it had to be pushed into 2023. The plane took off horizontally from the new facility at Cornwall Airport in Newquay while carrying the rocket under a wing.
To prepare Cosmic Girl for the launch the interior of the main deck was gutted of all seats and overhead bins to reduce the weight. The upper deck, which was the former premium and economy cabin, has been converted into a small mission control room for launch engineers to oversee the mission the during flight.
Once the Boeing 747 reached the drop site, the pilots flew her in a looping “racetrack” pattern ahead of the rocket launch.
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