Washington. January 14th. INTERFAX - The California aerospace company Virgin Orbit has carried out another successful launch of a LauncherOne rocket into orbit from aboard a carrier aircraft, a live broadcast was conducted on its website.
"The LauncherOne rocket has entered orbit," the company said in a statement.
A two - stage rocket with a length of 21 m was dropped at an altitude of approximately 9.5 thousand meters . m from a modified Boeing 747 aircraft (called Cosmic Girl) over the Pacific Ocean, after which the engine turned on. Following the separation of the first stage, the rocket entered a regular orbit with a group of mini-satellites on board.
The plane took off from Mojave Airfield in California at 13:38 on Thursday, Pacific Coast time (Friday at 00:38 Moscow time) and approximately 1 hour and 14 minutes later launched a rocket over the ocean 150 km southwest of Long Beach.
As part of the mission, called Above the Clouds ("Above the Clouds"), the rocket launched into orbit about 500 km high a group of experimental mini-satellites of the Pentagon designed to test communication technologies and navigation of objects in outer space, the American SpireGlobal device developed by Cornell University with the financial support of NASA, as well as two nanosatellites for the Polish company SatRevolution.
The LauncherOne launch vehicle is mounted under the left wing of a Boeing 747 aircraft, after an air launch it is capable of putting up to 500 kg of payload into a sun-synchronous orbit.
The first successful demonstration test of Virgin Orbit's LauncherOne rocket, owned by British billionaire Richard Branson, was carried out in January last year. The main enterprise of the company is located in the city of Long Beach. The development of the air launch system began in 2015.
The company notes that this method of launching small satellites into space is much cheaper than conventional rocket launches. The LauncherOne rocket uses rocket kerosene and liquid oxygen as fuel, which makes the cost quite low.
The air launch system also allows you to quickly move the rocket to any area for launch. Virgin Orbit previously reported that in the future launches are planned to be carried out from airfields in the USA, Japan and the UK.
This is the third successful launch of a Virgin Orbit rocket.
