The 747 'Cosmic Girl' jet took off from Cornwall Airport Newquay near Britain's southwest coast in what had been billed as the first orbital launch from the United Kingdom and Western Europe.
Virgin Orbit launched nine small satellites atop a rocket dropped from a 747 jumbo jet south of Ireland on Monday, but the booster suffered a failure during the climb to space and the payloads were lost, the company said.
Virgin Orbit's"Cosmic Girl" 747 jumbo jet undergoing final preparations before taking off with a LauncherOne rocket attached to its left wing. The rocket, carrying nine small satellites, was released over the Atlantic Ocean south of Ireland for a planned climb to polar orbit, but a malfunction of some sort triggered a mission-ending failure.
After a few long moments of silence, Virgin's webcast commentator said"it appears LauncherOne has suffered an anomaly, which will prevent us from making orbit on this mission." The company then tweeted the same, adding"we are evaluating the information." The Aman satellite, Oman's first, was a small Earth-observation platform built in collaboration with SatRevolution, a Polish"new space" satellite developer. Britain's Defense Science and Technology Laboratory and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory sponsored two CubeSats to study the ionosphere.
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