Has Branson’s space race dream crashed?
IT was surely the definition of a damp squib.
at 11.53pm on Monday night, Britain’s dreams of dominating the 21st- century space race crashed to Earth.
Cosmic Girl – a repurposed former Virgin atlantic 747 passenger plane carrying a rocket and nine satellites – had taken off successfully from Cornwall’s Newquay airport.
But just one hour and 51 minutes into the flight, the 2,000 spectators learned that a glitch had prevented the rocket launched from the plane from reaching the correct orbit.
It was less ‘Houston, we have a problem’, more ‘Newquay, we have an anomaly’.
There were groans and cries of ‘oh no’. some staff burst into tears as, minutes later, Cosmic Girl could be seen flying low on the horizon getting ready to make her return to the runway. she landed to muted cheers. Yet it had all started so well. The blustery winter weather had done nothing to quell the excitement of the crowd gathered by the rainswept runway.
They were captivated at the thought of watching the first satellite launch from both UK and European soil. Tens of thousands were also glued to a livestream at home.
a successful mission would be a major milestone for the UK space industry — not to mention Virgin Orbit, the company established five years ago as ‘Britain’s Premier satellite Launch service’ by billionaire sir Richard Branson.
The atmosphere at the launch had been carnivalesque, with food, drink and stalls selling T- shirts and hoodies emblazoned with the rallying cry ‘ start me up’, as per the mission’s optimistic name — itself a nod to the Rolling stones hit.
Inside spaceport Cornwall HQ – where celebratory bottles of locally produced Camel Valley sparkling wine were on standby – the atmosphere was even more charged: this was, after all, the culmination of a 13-year vision by sir Richard.
He was watching proceedings from his Caribbean home on Necker Island. at 9.51pm, cheers broke out when a Virgin Orbit spokesman announced: ‘we’re go for take-off.’
Five minutes later, Cosmic Girl could be seen lumbering across the airfield, and the crowd applauded as her engines powered up and she started to thunder down the runway.
at spaceport Cornwall, the Cornish-owned consortium set up to boost the county’s involvement in the space sector, staff from Virgin Orbit were on the edge of their seats.
at 10.02pm, she took off. ‘God speed, Cosmic Girl!’ proclaimed the spokesman.
at first the omens were good. shortly after 11pm came the news everyone had been waiting for: the LauncherOne rocket had been successfully released from the aircraft.
But then came that awful warning of an ‘ anomaly’ and Cosmic Girl’s dispiriting return to Newquay.
Cornwall’s ambition to reinvent itself as the bold new launchpad for space ventures now remains on ice, just like those bottles of local fizz.
so what went wrong? Possible explanations include a problem with engine performance, a component ‘not burning as it should’, or an issue with the nose cone at the end of the rocket, the ‘fairing’.
Either way, the satellites are no more: they are likely to have been burned up in Earth’s atmosphere with LauncherOne upon re-entry.
The disappointment is palpable for the teams at spaceport and Virgin Orbit. In the small hours of Tuesday morning, an emotional Melissa Thorpe, head of UK spaceport, said: ‘It is absolutely gutting.’
as for sir Richard, it took him until mid- afternoon yesterday to react publicly to mission failure, and he kept it brief. ‘Thank you for all your hard work,’ he tweeted to his colleagues.
‘Rocket burned up on re-entry’