Virgin Galactic is a spaceflight company within the Virgin Group. It is developing commercial spacecraft and aims to provide suborbital spaceflights to space tourists and suborbital launches for space science missions. Virgin Galactic plans to provide orbital human spaceflights as well. SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic's suborbital spacecraft, is air launched from beneath a carrier airplane known as White Knight Two.Virgin Galactic's founder, Sir Richard Branson, had initially suggested that he hoped to see a maiden flight by the end of 2009, but this date has been delayed on a number of occasions, most recently by the October 2014 in-flight loss of SpaceShipTwo VSS Enterprise.
| Founded | 2004 |
|---|---|
| Operating bases | Spaceport America Mojave Air & Space Port Long Beach Airport |
| Parent company | Virgin Group |
| Headquarters | Long Beach, California |
| Key people | Richard Branson (Chairman) George Whitesides (CEO) |
Governments, companies, and even individuals all around the world are
now building incredibly innovative small satellites. Once a team of
satellite innovators has invested their time and money perfecting their
satellite technology, they don’t want to sit around waiting for a launch
date that could be years in the future. The world’s leading satellite
inventors deserve a launch vehicle that works the way their satellites
work. That’s why LauncherOne is built to support quick, responsive, and
affordable cubesat and microsatellite missions.
LauncherOne has been designed from the start to be affordable,
reliable, flexible, and responsive. We accomplish those ambitious goals
through the way we design the system, the way we build it, and way we
operate it. One critically important aspect of our method is the way we
launch our system.
Rather than launching from a traditional launch pad at a spaceport,
LauncherOne is launched from our dedicated 747-400 carrier aircraft,
called Cosmic Girl.
Cosmic Girl will carry LauncherOne to at an altitude of approximately
35,000 feet before releasing the launch vehicle to begin its
rocket-powered flight to orbit. Starting each mission with an airplane
rather than a traditional launch pad offers performance benefits in
terms of payload capacity, but more importantly, air-launch offers an
unparalleled level of flexibility. LauncherOne will operate from a
variety of locations independently of traditional launch ranges—which
are often congested with traffic—and will have the ability operate
through or around a variety of weather conditions and other impediments
that delay traditional launches.
Once released from the carrier aircraft, the LauncherOne rocket fires
up its single main stage engine, a 73,500 lbf, LOX/RP-1 rocket engine
called the “NewtonThree.” Typically, this engine will fire for
approximately three minutes. After stage separation, the single upper
stage engine, a 5,000 lbf LOX/RP-1 rocket engine called the “NewtonFour”
will carry the satellite(s) into orbit. Typically, the second stage
will execute multiple burns totaling nearly six minutes. Both the
NewtonThree and the NewtonFour are highly reliable liquid rocket engines
designed, tested, and built by Virgin Galactic.
At the end of this sequence, LauncherOne will deploy our customers’
satellite (or satellites) into their desired orbit. Both stages of
LauncherOne will be safely deorbited, while the carrier aircraft will
return to a predetermined airport, where it can be quickly prepared for
its next flight.