Cosmic Girl, a Virgin Boeing 747-400 aircraft sits on the tarmac with Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket attached to the wing, ahead of its first UK launch tonight, at Spaceport Cornwall at Newquay Airport in Newquay, UK, January 9, 2023.
Henry Nicholls | Reuters
Virgin Orbit shares fell in trading on Monday evening after the corporate confirmed its first launch outside of the UK failed to achieve orbit.
Virgin Orbit shares fell as much as 30% in after-hours trading from a previous close of $1.93 a share.
The corporate uses a modified 747 jet to launch satellites into space, dropping a rocket from under the plane’s wing mid-flight – a technique referred to as air launch.
A Virgin Orbit webcast showed the LauncherOne rocket deploying and firing up its engine, with the corporate saying in a tweet that the rocket “successfully reached earth orbit”. But about half an hour later, the corporate announced that the launch had an “anomaly” and that the nine satellites on board wouldn’t reach orbit.
Virgin Orbit is reviewing launch data to discover the source of the failure and has admitted to deleting a tweet about reaching orbit. The 747 and its crew safely returned and landed at Spaceport Cornwall in southwest England.
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Monday’s mission was Virgin Orbit’s sixth mission thus far and its second failure.
The corporate has only carried out two launches in 2022, fewer than the projected 4 to 6 missions Virgin Orbit said earlier last yr. At the top of the third quarter, Virgin Orbit had $71.2 million in money and raised a further $25 million in the midst of the fourth quarter from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, an existing major shareholder.