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It should be three in a row for Virgin Orbit.
The third successful mission for the California-based company occurred today when Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne rocket lofted seven small satellites for three different customers.
Cosmic Girl, a modified Boeing 757 carrier aircraft, lifted off from the Southern California desert at 4:39 p.m. California time is 1:39 p.m.
The plane flew southwest for about 70 minutes until it reached its designated drop zone, a patch of the Pacific Ocean about 50 miles southwest of California's Channel Islands. Cosmic Girl released a new product. The two-stage rocket powered its way to space.
All seven of the seven payloads were successfully deployed into their planned elliptical path above Earth. The time is 2353 GMT.
The Virgin Orbit's One rocket is used for satellite missions.
We have it, folks! Mission Control has just told us that all customer spaceships were successfully deployed into their target orbit. A big step forward for our customers, and another fantastic day for the Virgin Orbit team.
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There are a number of successes.
Virgin Orbit plans to carve out a sizable share of the small-satellite market with Cosmic Girl and the 70 foot-long One Launcher, which is capable of delivering 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms) to orbit on each mission.
The air-launch strategy of Virgin Orbit and Virgin Galactic, both part of the Richard Branson's Virgin Group, gives customers more flexibility and responsiveness than they can get with traditional vertically launched rockets, according to the company.
The director of the U.S. military's Space Test Program said that they need to be able to act and be able to provide the technology in a timely manner.
"Deploying a rocket from an aircraft allows for flexibility, because you're not tied to a specific ground point and the challenges that can come with that," he said. I think we're excited about seeing where this technology goes and the opportunity that comes with it.
In May 2020, LauncherOne flew for the first time on a test flight. The rocket's first-stage engine broke down, causing the mission to fail.
The second flight, which took place in January 2021, was a success and delivered 10 cubesats to NASA. The test phase was over by flight three, which lofted seven small satellites.
Today's mission was named "Above the Clouds" after a 1998 song by Gang Starr. The Space Force does a lot of research and development, which is sponsored by four.
"These are experiments that they're flying, typically to test space technologies and advanced satellites and communication," Virgin Orbit CEO Dan Hart said during a pre-launch call with reporters on Tuesday.
Virgin Orbit's carrier plane, Cosmic Girl, will take off from the Mojave Air and Space Port on January 13, 2022. The image is from Virgin Orbit.
Virgin Orbit representatives said during today's launch that the experiment will demonstrate cost-efficient, autonomously rendezvous and docking technology using two tiny cubesats.
The Technology Education Satellite-13 is a cubesat built by NASA's Ames Research Center in California and will demonstrate advanced communication and machine learning. The Global Star Evaluation and Risk Reduction Satellite is a U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory cubesat experiment that aims to see how effectively a prototype patch placed on a satellite's exterior can gather and transmit information about the craft's health.
SatRevolution provided two of the other satellites. One of them will join Sat-Revolution's Stork constellation of Earth-observation spacecraft, and the other will give water- fueled thrusters developed by English company SteamJet Space Systems an off-Earth test.
The seventh satellite, called Adler-1, is owned by San Francisco-based company Spire Global. Virgin Orbit representatives said that the space debris environment will be studied by the 12-inch-long (30 centimeters) spacecraft.
SatRevolution and the STP are repeat customers for Virgin Orbit, and they flew on the June 2021 mission called "Tubular Bells: Part One." The first track off Mike Oldfield's 1973 album "Tubular Bells" was released by Virgin Records. The Gang Starr album "Moment of Truth" was a Virgin release.
The benefits of space research are huge.
"Above the Clouds" kicked off a busy year for Virgin Orbit. The company will launch two missions from Spaceport Cornwall in England. The other three will lift off from a different location.
Hart said that the Cornwall launches are targeted in the middle of the year.
He said that they were driving for that, but that was dependent on getting through the licensing process successfully. The first launch from the U.K. soil will be the first from the European area.
The launch operations of Virgin Orbit are being extended to other localities. Hart said that the company has laid a lot of groundwork for launching from Guam. Japan and Brazil have signed agreements with Virgin Orbit.
"We are having discussions and different levels of activities with a number of other countries including Australia and several European countries, as well as countries in other areas," Hart said. It's a hot topic for us now.
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