Good morning. There were two awkward misfires arising from the UK’s pioneering space launch on Monday, and this newsletter isn’t about Grant Shapps’s dodgy Photoshop job.
After a Virgin Orbit Boeing 747 took off from Cornwall at 10pm, carrying what would have been the first satellites to get into space from anywhere in western Europe, spectators at the launch site outside Newquay did a conga. The rocket carrying the satellites was released at 35,000 feet an hour later – and briefly made it into space. But then came “an anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit”, and mission failure. Now UK air accident investigators are trying to work out what went wrong.
