It seems like a neat idea but it really doesn't save money, though. The hard part, as in the vast majority of energy & fuel needed, is to get horizontal velocity not altitude.
The complexity and cost of a 747 carrying a rocket up for an additional maybe ~3% of orbital velocity just doesn't pencil out in the end
And reusable boosters sway the calculus even further toward ground-based launches, both in cost and launch system simplification.
You can instead of using that 747 with more optimized aircraft for this purpose. And you can make the boosters reusable. Stratolaunch was on a good path long term but ran out of cash.
The dilemma with VO's approach was the same as OSC, thinking that reusing parts made for something else is cheaper short term and long term, where in fact more $ short and long. Yes the carrier was too expensive to maintain and material tech wasn't there yet to stop boil on the upper stages during staging. But the tradeoff was you can launch (nearly) anywhere, anytime, but regs/politics killed that benefit. I think we had potentially 8 locations at one point, ended up with 3. And thus, here we are. Sad VO couldn't keep the idea innovating.
The benefit of a plane based launch is the flexibility
Want to launch from say Israel, currently you can only launch retrograde (to the west), as you can't launch over land (especially countries with questionable friendliness)
You could in theory launch via Virgin One, fly south along the red sea and then launch over the Indian Ocean
Same with launches from the West Coast US -- want to launch Polar, that's fine, you can launch south out of LA (and that's what they do). You can't launch East though, you have to move the rocket from California to Florida to launch.
You don't need to worry much about bad weather at the launch site either. Got rain and lightning in Florida? Unless it's really bad you can still take off in a plane, then launch from above or away from that bad weather
It's similar to why launching from a mountain top isn't worth it. If you're launching to a few hundred km altitude, a 2km or even a 10km head start is peanuts. And altitude is only a small fraction of the problem, compared to orbital speeds large jet aircraft are barely even moving.
If you're launching anti-satelite missiles that's different. Getting altitude is the main aim, and military jets can get reasonably high with a small missile as payload.
The major savings is in exponentially less air to go through, so you can do more aggressive gravity turn so you have less gravity losses.
And he didn't even address the reentry questions, both of which are actually plausible - if you somehow have the fuel to drastically reduce your orbital velocity, you're suddenly no different than a sounding rocket, indeed not needing a heat shield. And if you cleverly slow down your reentry over many orbits, it can be very gentle.
The benefits of the "exponentially less air" diminish once you have to slap an aerosurface on the vehicle (added weight + drag) to perform the pitch up maneuver Coupled with the fact that on deployment the vehicle is gaining velocity in the wrong direction until the engines ignite, accelerate forwards, and the vehicle begins the turn. The theoretical benefits of air launch quickly fade away given these practical realities. Nevermind the much more complex operations that comes with air launch.
There's a reason why air launch has more or less died as an idea. The theoretical savings don't typically manifest once the additional complexities are accounted for.
I've seen it pushed as a potential way to launch into orbits that are harder to achieve via current launch sites; in theory, a plane-launched rocket can start from anywhere in the world.
It cost a HUGE amount of money. The reason is that in the plane you have people, so the rocket design has to take that into account and validating the rocket costs more. Just for reference, SpaceX and RocketLab sent their rocket to space for under 100M, while Virgin spend like 500M. That's partly because of worse leadership, but its partly inherent.
A plane also isn't cheap, a ground launch station for a small rocket isn't that expensive.
Additionally engineering the rocket to get carried vertically adds structure, that cost money and lowers payload. You end up not gaining that much from air-launch. It also makes the structure and avionics quite complex.
Once you drop the rocket, the engine has to start or the payload is gone. Other rockets can start the engine, verify its good and then launch. Relativity space just did that.
It also puts huge constraints on your rockets, the size in both weight and volume is inherently limited, and you can't evolve the architecture. In comparison SpaceX Falcon 1 could have easily been slightly upgraded and turned into a rocket that could lift 1T+ and even more eventually. And then they managed to use that engine to build a Falcon 9.
Virgin Orbit has this one rocket, and its impossible to make back 100s of millions of investment with a tiny rocket and low launch cadence. They can't make the rocket significantly bigger because of the limits of the plane.
I thought it was impossible for them to ever be a real company and that seem to have ended up happening. Launch is a really tough business.
> And why does a single failure doom a company after 4 successful launches.
Because they have already burned down a gigantic amount of cash and were in a bad stage, launch success or not. A launch earns them 12M or so. That basically nothing considering their investments and their burn.
Is that really true? If it is, I am struggling to understand what the money is being spent on. I mean the cost of Space Shuttle launches was in that neighborhood.
We don't have official numbers but pretty good industry reporting that puts the numbers there. Read Eric Bergers reporting on them over the last 5 years or so.
Its mostly just lots of people and time. Plus buying 1-2 planes.
Space Shuttle development was of course way more. A single margin launch cost 500M. But with fixed cost it was 1 billion+.
These points are all so well-reasoned and difficult to argue against, I can't fathom how they managed to get all the way to this point without these things coming up and causing a rethink of the base approach. Quite incredible.
> These points are all so well-reasoned and difficult to argue against, I can't fathom how they managed to get all the way to this point without these things coming up and causing a rethink of the base approach. Quite incredible.
Isn't "launch from a plane" basically reusable first stage, 1.0? It was also more conservative, since the idea had already been successfully implemented in 1990: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_Pegasus.
Some quick googling shows Virgin Orbit started in 2011, and SpaceX landed their first rocket in 2015. Virgin Orbit's idea may have make a lot more sense before SpaceX proved out an alternative, and that didn't happen until maybe they'd done a lot of development that could have possibly paid off.
Successfully implemented in technical terms. Not really in financial terms. The rocket cost a huge amount and even with the already absurd launch prices the US military paid it wasn't the most successful. It never competed for the competitive international launch market.
SpaceX landed a rocket in 2015, but Virgin Orbit wasn't even competitive with Falcon 1. Landing rockets has little to do with why it wasn't working out.
Yes without Falcon 9 the market would be quite a bit bigger, but even then its hard to see how VO ever gets very far. Its offering even compared to the other small launch competition isn't really competitive. Their offering was 12M for a tiny payload, their competition was often less then 10M for payloads with more flexibility in size and volume.
They simply have no migration path, no way to make their vehicle bigger, and pretty much every small launch company has realized that small launch isn't really a business you want to be in.
They managed to get a lot of financing pretty early on and managed to be one of the first to orbit, but their financial outlook was always pretty bad.
Orbital Sciences, now Northrop Grumman, has successfully used plane launches for the Pegasus a few dozen times since the 90s. They use a Lockheed TriStar instead of a 747, but the principle is the same. It definitely works.
Their launch volume has been trending down though. I don't think they're able to effectively compete for most contracts.
Yes, launch stage was pretty bulletproof, 2nd upto the liquid stage were the problems (should be fixed by now that the tech exists). The systems are likely the same as 2005 that new VC funded launch companies can undercut price with updated designs/tech (R&D expenses absorbed by VCs). I think the telemetry live stream/OpenGl viz of the last minotaur launch looked like a slightly revised UIX of the original live stream tool I built back in the 90s (I worked on Pegasus), aka old tech, not shiny.
Edit: Really it's a potential energy to cost problem. 5% more efficiency is [actually] big when leaving this planet, but yes, cost of air launch is still stuck in 1990 times. From the outside I didn't see any innovation from the VO team aside from electronics. As for VG, I used to work with their new CEO and Eng VP: they know ops, but I thought the systems/tech hadn't been flush out 100%, so may have the similar fate if a few customers start canceling. I have some ideas to 'fix' air launch requiring big R&D, but knee deep in fixing autonomous drones!
Peg was not financially successful cause prior 2002, the space race was maybe 15 launches a year: not profitable. Stuff like Iridium failed, shutting down ideas of having thousands of sats in LEO, mind that the only markets were communications (cellular/fiber won), science experiments, and imaging (imaging/remote sensing? Drone tech will eventually win). Luckily LEO payloads are a cool idea again-- tech is better + moore's law, thus demand is HOT. Heck Orbcomm is up there today, but old tech no one really wants.
Today, Elon played the long game (2002) and kept innovating where SpaceX has found the cost-benefit balance via reusability, and [with timing] being the only system post Shuttle it's a duopoly with ULA--charge as much to stay in the black. BUT the markets are still the 3 above, nothing new (Elon's Mars thing == passion project) though every country now wants their 'own constellation' cause of the NRO, hehe.
It definitely works. But whether the it works economically compared with the traditional static ground launch is the question. Pegasus is simply more expensive than it's ground based competition.
There are other small-sat rocket which are cheaper. The Rocket Lab Electron is $7.5 million for 250kg while Pegasus is $40 million for 450kg. Plus, SpaceX has piggyback program for small sats that is cheaper but longer wait.
Even Antonio Elias, the person behind Pegasus and main designer, admitted that it didn't work out at all the way they predicted. You had the complication and rigmarole of launching from an aircraft but you still had to launch close to a range for comm and safety reasons.
"This one failure killed it" is a poplar story. See also Zeppelins being doomed by the Hindenburg disaster, and the Concorde being doomed by an exploding tire. Failures can be the straw that breaks the camel's back, but saying they are the reason for killing their product is only true in the technical sense.
If you work out the rocket equation, it turns out that you can achieve the delta-v of this stage 0 with about a 30% increase in fuel (assuming a 3 km/s exhaust velocity). Since the volume of a tank goes up with the cube of the linear dimensions, you need to increase the height and diameter of the boosters by only 10%. This seems to me to be a much easier task than engineering the whole mechanism of keeping a rocket hooked on a moving airplane, dealing with vibrations, make it sturdy enough so it does not collapse when it's not in a vertical position, and lots of other challenges associated with the unusual launch mode.
To pile on on other comments regarding the non viability of air launch rocketry, the only reason it makes sense is for rerouting launch locations based on weather.
The only customer needing an asset in orbit regardless of a weather violation is the military. The other bonus would be spreading out launch locations to essentially any airport rather than a few launch locations that could be denied by enemies.
However their desire for it hasn’t been enough to fund it. Even Astra (with a similar launch anywhere, whenever premise) hasn’t been robustly funded by the US military.
I'm surprised they would ever shut it down. I always thought of these corporate space programs as pet projects of billionaires with effectively infinite funding.
Richard Branson’s last 3 investments ($25, $20 & $10 million) have all been secured against the company’s assets. I don’t see anyone paying $55 million for it as a going concern so it looks like he’ll inherit it. Will be interesting to see if he chooses to continue or shut it down once it’s back in his hands.
Virgin Galactic was the most disgusting pump-and-dump ever. They literally SPAC telling a story about intercontinental hypersonic flight. Fucking absurd, the company can't make low power hybrid engine burn a short time readability and have constant issue with their air-frame. And beyond have a terrible safety culture.
Yeah that company is gone build an intercontinental hypersonic airliner that about 100x more difficult problem. When will the get it working, in 2150?
It was literally a pure lie and grift for money, and soon after Branson and all the leadership of VG dropped stocks like crazy.
Branson also invested in this idiotic Hyperloop company. Another pure investor drift nonsense, but at least it didn't SPAC.
There are real advantages to launching from higher up, not just in terms of reducing drag losses but in using larger engine bells with higher ISPs, saving on structural mass due to lower aerodynamic forces, and maybe launching from over the sea if otherwise you'd have a hard time finding a safe launch corridor.
But rockets are usually launched from the middle of large, empty pads for a reason since there's always the danger of an explosion. Unmanned planes could help but planes are expensive pieces of capital to have sitting around if you don't have a fast launch cadence. I'd tend to favor balloon style designs, though that makes getting to remote launch locations more awkward.
Balloon launch is a god-awful concept. Not only do you have the logistical challenges of air-launch (compounded by carrying a bomb with a minimally controllable vehicle), you also don't have the horizontal velocity of an aircraft to provide additional dynamic pressure at the critical pitch-up first turn phase of flight, AND you have the absymal lifting capabilities of a balloon. Balloon launch is all the downsides of air launch with a few extra thrown in for good measure, with almost zero advantages over traditional air-launch (let alone ground launch)
> you also don't have the horizontal velocity of an aircraft to provide additional dynamic pressure at the critical pitch-up first turn phase of flight
Isn't one of the (few) advantages of balloon launch that this critical pitch-up maneuver is far less dramatic? At launch the rocket can already be oriented mostly vertical instead of mostly horizontal.
Of course this has the attendant disadvantage that your rocket starts with less kinetic energy.
> and furlough almost all its staff, although the company did not officially confirm the furloughs to BBC News
It is a fun point that I live in the UK and have headed up finance at SMEs. Until the pandemic I had never even heard the term 'furlough'. What does it mean now? If they are UK staff I doubt you can do anything other than make them redundant.
I'm aware of that. I, like everyone else in the UK, googled it at the start of the pandemic. My point was more that the linked article was from the BBC, and this is a phrase that is basically legally meaningless in the UK.
Yes, but the odds of them finding a buyer are astronomical. Full reusability is the future. Even ULA is reportedly up for sale after backing away from plans for their new rocket to be reusable. The new space race will be SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Blue Origin failing to deliver on time is a big part of the reason ULA is floundering. ULA bet on Blue Origin being able to provide engines for the Vulcan Centaur in a timely manner, but what they got were years of delays.
And now that Bezos had his little joyride, he seems to have checked space off his bucket list and turned his attention towards yachting with his new wife, so I don't expect we'll see productive management reform in Blue Origin anytime soon.
For the moment it's SpaceX vs everyone else combined, given how far ahead they are.
I won't rule out China rising to the challenge, but I also wouldn't want to rule out Relativity Space and their 3D printing, nor some as-yet unannounced group saying they've made a breakthrough with superconducting levitation or active support structures or skyhooks or fusion-powered second stages that let them go directly (from a high altitude but suborbital first stage so you don't have to worry about backscattered radiation from the air) to Δv = 0.1c.
Yeah but here is the reality of the situation. The AR-15, the alternative engine, was years behind the BE-4 in development and likely would have been delayed just as much and also costs more for worse performance and a with a company behind it that has no independent interest in the engine.
Also, ULA is not floundering. In fact the opposite. Amazon bought all Ariane 5s and given the increasingly constrained launch market, if you have a heavy lifter that can launch, you likely get some contracts.
Bezos might be yachting, but he is currently spending 2-3 billion a year on a company that doesn't have revenue. So he is serious and they will just push threw.
Japan, China, Russia, and the EU will all insist on their own rocket launch capability, won't they?
At a minimum SpaceX shows the path to Starship-level reductions in launch payload costs, then the other state actors will follow the formula.
If this just represents flawed approaches being trimmed from the marketplace, well ok.
... Blue Origin needs to get to "real" orbit, right? Last I heard they were resorting to troll-lawsuits against SpaceX because they weren't getting government launch contracts. Yeah, because... you ... can't yet?
The ESA/ArianeGroup was blindsided by the economic feasibility of rocket reuse. They have only recently come to terms with this and begun developing their own semi-reusable equivalent to Falcon 9. Ariane 6 (no reuse) hasn't even flown yet but is already obsolete. A European Falcon 9 equivalent is many years away.
I expect the EU to continue building their own rockets anyway, so they don't have to rely on the US and/or Russia. They do want their own launch capability as you mention. But will they produce anything that can compete with SpaceX for the sort of contracts that could go to an American company? Not anytime soon; they're already years behind and if Starship flies soon the gap will be huge.
Absolutely it will be a target of intense espionage, but I think building the machine itself is only part of the trouble. A big part of making the machine like that work reliably is having the right sort of work culture, otherwise errors and anomalies will get swept under the rug with disastrous results. I think this will be even more necessary with reusable rockets than with one-off disposable rockets, since with reusable rockets you have to constantly re-validate used hardware, not just brand new parts. The right sort of safety culture isn't as easy to steal as some CAD files. Even if you stole all the plans, it would be many years of hard work to get an organization into the right sort of shape to build and operate the machine.
As for SpaceX being a private company and therefore unusually easy to infiltrate... no. All US defense contractors are private companies, SpaceX being a private company isn't anything special. A B-21 bomber isn't made in a government-run factory, it is made in a Northrop Grumman factory. Spy satellites, missile seeker heads, stealth jet RAM coatings, IFF and crypto systems... all of these things are made by companies contracted by the government. The FBI/etc counter-espionage specialists are well accustomed to this sort of work, SpaceX is nothing special in this regard.
Japan builds their own rockets but they are low volume and not in the market, mostly domestic stuff. Russia is for now out of the international a launch market. China is mostly out of the 'Western' launch market as well, but there is a lot going on there.
EU is spending lots of money for bad results. But because of Amazon they have some contracts. Basically any heavy lift rocket not by SpaceX will get contracts. But SpaceX for now will have to fly a lot of the European payloads, because it will take a long time before Ariane 6 is full operational.
And then it will take another 10 years and another 5-10 billion $ for Europe to launch a competitor to Falcon 9. By that point of course, Starship will already be standard.
India builds rockets at low cadence and are not a serous contender.
> then the other state actors
That takes 15-20 years.
> Blue Origin
Blue Origin spends 2-3 billion a year without revenue. But they are pushing forward. They want be in orbit until 2025 and to be fully operational it will take a lot longer.
"Japan, China, Russia, and the EU will all insist on their own rocket launch capability, won't they?"
For their spy sats: well OF COURSE! And we're on the verge of a lot of demand, not considering cheap cubesats can use a 50MP camera + good opticcs and near real-time, global comms.
Europe will have to develop a fully reusable launcher to be competitive. Let's call it Ariane 7 and expect it to fly around 2035. They first have to get Ariane 6 off the ground and that's, from what I've heard, a horribly slow process.
And Stoke Space, which is going for full reusability with an aerospike on the second stage. Everyday Astronaut got a visit and it seemed pretty impressive.
Maybe a country with inconvenient geography. You really want to launch rockets close to the equator to save fuel, and ideally you want to launch on a path that doesn't drop debris (from spent stages or potential failures) on inhabited areas or foreign nations. Few such sites exist, but if you launch from an airplane you can just fly to a convenient location somewhere in international waters
As an example, Russia's launch sites are all suboptimal. Baikanur is at about the latitude of Quebec (not exactly the equator), the launch path is over land, and it's in Kazakhstan instead of in Russia. They recently opened Vostochny on the Russian East coast which improves two of those points, at the cost of being even further north.
For most things, including servicing the ISS, it's perfectly adequate, and for satellites that go into polar orbits it doesn't matter, but some orbits are hard to reach from those launch sites because of the inclination. In the past Russia has used ESA's launch site in French Guiana for those, but that's not an option for them right now.
Indian launch sites are pretty close to the equator however, and shipping even secret military payloads to India for launching is feasible. Since there's already sharing of some sensitive military secrets between New Delhi and Moscow.
If it was 10x the cost per kg then maybe Russia would look into alternative systems, but I imagine 2x or 3x the market rate would secure an unlimited number of launch slots.
When you have business in space, having independent launch capabilities is a strategic matter, whatever your relationships with your partner countries are. E.g. Europe wants to keep access to space without having to rely solely on the United States.
It really was not all that novel. Pegasus had been around for over 20 years before it was founded, and had already proven air launch more or less economically unviable compared with ground based launchers.
i've been fascinated about rockets since im 3, was drawing engines with turbopumps by 5, but since i read about ecology at 35 i am now convinced we need exactly two types of satellites:
1) earth observation and weather one, to monitor a very dangerous warming on this planet
2) icbm early warning systems, to avoid cooling it very fast.
what argument do you have for more orbital stuff and which type?
Communications and astronomy seem like very reasonable uses of space. Comms because how much of the planet can be seen/covered be a single device, and astronomy to bypass information loss from the atmosphere.
I'd like to remind everyone this is the same guy that took tax breaks and grants and has failed at pretty much everything, including trains, somehow, it's pretty much given on a silver platter - this is not unexpected
What will happen to Spaceport Cornwall then, if Virgin Orbit shuts down? Seems like a massive waste of investment then since I don't think any launch provider will take its place. Pretty grim for the UK space launch industry as a whole.
UK is perfect for launches to about 55 degree retrograde inclination
You wouldn't want to launch into a sun-syncrhonous orbit from the Equator. Or from Florida or Cape Canaveral for that matter. The delta-V you start with which is great for an equatorial launch has to be shed to get into a polar or near-polar orbit.
From Scotland though, there's far less Delta V than Florida, or from French Guiana.
"The airport handled 461,300 passengers in 2017, a 24.2% increase over the previous year.[2] Newquay has a CAA Public Use Aerodrome Licence that allows flights for the public transport of passengers or for flying instruction. The Cornwall Air Ambulance is based at the airport. Since 2012, the airport has hosted the Aerohub enterprise zone.
The airport is also the base for Spaceport Cornwall / Virgin Orbit space satellite launches."
Not that much was actually invested or committed, relatively speaking:
"In June 2019, the UK government and Cornwall Council announced they were prepared to invest up to £20M into the airport to create the Spaceport Cornwall as a base for Virgin Orbit. On 5 November 2019, the UK Space Agency announced that it would provide £7.35M to establish Virgin Orbit operations at Spaceport Cornwall."
I wonder why they couldn't make it work. And why does a single failure doom a company after 4 successful launches.