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First Space Launch From UK Soil Today

By the way most of the shots of mission control like that one that I saw came from after the failure but before any acknowledgement of failure, and everyone was sitting around not doing very much. There were some potential body language tells I suppose.
 
Supine said:
Or not as it turns out
Click to expand...
Probably burned through the entire propellant budget with that momentary unscheduled side mission to the vicinity of exoplanet WASP-189b.
Jump to hyperspace.​

Back in our region of space-time, it was spotted re-entering off the coast of the Canaries (this is the upper stage re-entering and not the nominal first stage disposal mentioned in the video title/caption, which was further north, back uprange, and would have had more of a head-on/line-of-sight perspective to this observer than the video suggests, plus probably insufficient energy to put on this sort of display).
​

Last telemetry data and track.
First stage disposal hazard box.
 
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Idris2002 said:
Who was running this one then? Eddie the Eagle?
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If you look at the main character who fronts the whole Cornwall spaceport show they are basically a PR/development bod who lucked into the role X years ago rather than a big brained rocket scientist

PR is on point but it’s not going to silence nayesaying misery cunts of cornwall
Who are already banging on about how many homeless people could be accommodated with “wasted rocket money” while still planning on voting Tory first opportunity

It’s a fucking peculiar place
 
Spymaster said:
Spaceport bloke disagrees with you. His pitch was that the mission had shown that Spaceport Cornwall is viable, that the airspace and maritime space was well managed, etc. etc.

He barely stopped short of saying that the bit that fucked-up was American!
Click to expand...
They want to have their cake and eat it - claim that an airport is a spaceport but then when something goes wrong claim they had nothing to do with the space bit.
 
kebabking said:
The UK is the second largest builder of satellites after the US. And they're insured.
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That is no relief if you just invested a year of your life into a satellite which was just fried by Virgin in a nanosecond and now you will be doomed into spending the next year of your life building it's replacement.
 
A thread detailing an armchair theory as to what might have happened leading to loss of vehicle/mission.

Essentially, liquid oxygen (LOX) oxidiser loss at second stage ignition; LOX didn't appear to drop in proportion to fuel (RP-1) burn. The propulsion system then probably struggled with pressurisation leading to an unbalanced stage (turning moments about the centre of mass), consequent erratic gimbaling and then loss of flight control and thus vehicle (is the theory†).

Cosmic Penguin (@Cosmic_Penguin)

Well, based on other people's comments elsewhere, I've reviewed the webcast for the #LauncherOne #StartMeUp failure. And I noticed a fatal bug on the telemetry screen. @VirginOrbit has generously provided data on fuel amount, line pressure, voltage etc. & sth fishy does show up.
notabird.site notabird.site
† Assuming the streamed telemetry data was valid, of course.
 
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weltweit said:
That is no relief if you just invested a year of your life into a satellite which was just fried by Virgin in a nanosecond and now you will be doomed into spending the next year of your life building it's replacement.
Click to expand...

I shouldn't imagine it's so much worse than jobs that include tasks such as, for example, emptying the same wheelie bins every week. Disgruntled satellite makers should get over themselves imo.
 
platinumsage said:
I shouldn't imagine it's so much worse than jobs that include tasks such as, for example, emptying the same wheelie bins every week. Disgruntled satellite makers should get over themselves imo.
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Why would anyone trust the launch of their million dollar baby to a company proudly announcing that they never did it before!
 
arstechnica.com

Even before Monday’s launch failure, Virgin Orbit’s finances were dismal

Some financial analysts believe the company will run out of money in March.
arstechnica.com arstechnica.com
Space industry thinks they are dead in 3 months. If you want to launch at this mass cheap, you go rideshare with SpaceX. If you need a bespoke time or inclination you go Rocketlabs.
There is a use case for this and that is military, they could need on demand small sat launching. But if the US threw something like that open to tender, the real big boys would turn up.
 
weltweit said:
Need another 7 satellites!
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Prompted by this very statement, two questions arise that I have sometimes pondered. Considering that the actual materials and parts cost needed to build a satellite must surely constitute a small part of the overall budget for designing and putting a satellite in orbit, surely it makes sense to build a second unit as a back up fir not much more?

Second question: can you get insurance for a failed launched and loss of your satellite, and/or a full refund from the rocket company?
 
2hats said:
A thread detailing an armchair theory as to what might have happened leading to loss of vehicle/mission.

Essentially, liquid oxygen (LOX) oxidiser loss at second stage ignition; LOX didn't appear to drop in proportion to fuel (RP-1) burn. The propulsion system then probably struggled with pressurisation leading to an unbalanced stage (turning moments about the centre of mass), consequent erratic gimbaling and then loss of flight control and thus vehicle (is the theory†).

Cosmic Penguin (@Cosmic_Penguin)

Well, based on other people's comments elsewhere, I've reviewed the webcast for the #LauncherOne #StartMeUp failure. And I noticed a fatal bug on the telemetry screen. @VirginOrbit has generously provided data on fuel amount, line pressure, voltage etc. & sth fishy does show up.
notabird.site notabird.site
† Assuming the streamed telemetry data was valid, of course.
Click to expand...
I'll lend my support to this theory via my own armchair. I went and looked at some of the past missions streams, and watched the dashboard again this time. I put to one side all moments with completely erratic, fluctuating OX readings this time, and theories about sloshing. And with those out of the way the picture is still there of the OX reading consistently dropping quicker than the other fuel reading, unlike in previous missions.

And the theory is compatible with all the other doom data and timing I observed and mentioned previously. The OX reading was a bad sign right from the start of the second engine phase, whereas the other bad indications I noticed and mentioned previously didnt start until about half way through the second engines first burn. The other missions featured much higher speeds during the second half of that phase than we ever got to see in the data this time (comically high speed reading spikes excluded). The maximum altitudes in the data on previous streams varied quite a bit so I cant say quite how far short we fell of that this time, might have been quite close to target altitude, might have been well over 100,000 feet off the target.

The call to shutdown the second engine happened reasonably close to the time when that call would have been made if the mission had been a success, but I still think that this time the call was made because it was clear there had been an unrecoverable failure by that point. In previous streams the call to shutdown that engine was the moment of triumph, preceded by a message that mission criteria had been achieved, and swiftly followed by celebrations. This time it was just a downbeat call to switch off newton 4, with none of the other indications of success. So I will stand by my remarks about all the covering bullshit that the commentator indulged in from that point onwards this time.

The previous streams were not much better overall presentationally, but they did at least have better visuals and didnt miss the drop - doing this UK one in the dark really hampered their ability to show interesting camera shots. We probably got to see so much of the dashboard this time because there wasnt anything else to show. The call to shutdown engine 2 in the previous missions streams was about the last moment that anything interesting happened in those ones too, they didnt stick around for ages to get to the stage of deploying the payload etc. So the failure of this mission actually made very little difference to what would have happened next on the stream. We were just missing the message about operational parameters having been met, an instruction to start the BBQ roll, a few people going yay, and an instruction to remove the airspace restrictions soon after.
 
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