Britain’s space mission fails
For the first time a rocket with satellites on board should be launched from British soil. But there was an unexpected problem.
According to the US company Virgin Orbit involved, unexpected problems arose during the planned satellite launch in Great Britain on Tuesday night. “It appears that an anomaly prevented us from reaching orbit,” the company tweeted. You evaluate the information. There were no further details at first.
For the first time, a jumbo jet had previously flown from British soil as a flying launch pad for space satellites. The converted machine, dubbed “Cosmic Girl,” took off from Newquay Airport in south-west England late Monday evening. However, the mission apparently failed.
“Own Access to Space”
At a height of around 10.7 kilometers above the Atlantic Ocean, the converted Boeing 747 aircraft should then send the launch vehicle into space, which in turn will put nine small satellites into orbit. It is about civil as well as military use. They were intended to be used, among other things, to discover smugglers and to observe the weather. The plane should meanwhile return to earth.
With the mission, Britain wanted to join the exclusive club of countries capable of launching rockets into orbit. So far, satellites built in the UK have had to launch into space from spaceports abroad. Joining the “really exclusive club of launch nations” is so important because it “gives us our own access to space that we’ve never had here in the UK,” Cornwall Spaceports director Melissa Thorpe told the BBC on Monday. TV.
Spaceports are mostly privately operated
Responsible is the US space company Virgin Orbit of the British billionaire Richard Branson, which has been carrying out similar launches in the USA since 2021. For a long time, satellites were only launched by state institutions. In the meantime, however, most of the spaceports in Europe are privately operated.
The industry has experienced massive growth with the establishment of numerous small space start-ups. It is estimated that around 18,500 small satellites weighing less than 500 kilograms will be launched between 2022 and 2031. In the previous decade, however, there were only about 4,600.
Newquay is one of a total of seven planned spaceports in the United Kingdom. The first vertical launch of a rocket is planned in Scotland later this year. The UK government hopes the space industry will contribute around £3.8 billion to the UK economy over the next decade.
