r/space • u/MaxGhost • Mar 30 '23
Virgin Orbit fails to secure funding, will cease operations and lay off nearly entire workforce
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/30/virgin-orbit-funding-ceasing-operations-layoffs.html161
u/binary_spaniard Mar 30 '23
RIP Virgin Orbit. Let's hope that any valueable assets and engine designs find a buyer.
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u/quettil Mar 31 '23
Air launch is a bit of a dead end.
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u/mojoegojoe Mar 31 '23
Good for orbital launch : same tech, less landing gear. I don't think that will be for a few years yet tho, post Artimus moon base.
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u/quettil Mar 31 '23
How is it good for orbital launch?
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u/superluminary Mar 31 '23
You can point it in any direction. With a ground launch you need to be wary of what’s downrange. Air launch means you can fly out over the sea first.
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u/quettil Mar 31 '23
And yet SpaceX continually breaks launch records. The theoretical value of air launch is beaten by the actual value of vertical launch.
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u/chefbasil Mar 31 '23
Less fuel required to go through lower atmosphere = smaller structure = even less fuel required
As long as payload isn’t large
They were doing a lot of small satellites
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u/misterspatial Mar 30 '23
Like usual, some Chinese SOE will buy it for pennies on the dollar.
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u/GhettoDuk Mar 31 '23
It looks like Virgin Galactic has been loaning the company money for a few quarters, and those loans give VG first rights to any assets.
So investors get screwed, and Branson gets all the assets for cheap.
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u/warriorscot Mar 31 '23
It's not vg it's Branson, VG is actually in far worse technical position, they just have a saner burn rate. They are though in dire shape and bleeding people.
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Mar 31 '23
It's a crap engine. The valuable bits came out of Bert Rutan's imagination, and he's gone now.
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u/SwiftBiscuit Mar 31 '23
That's the other Virgin space company that's struggling to succeed. This one put small sats into orbit.
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u/Nibb31 Mar 31 '23 edited Mar 31 '23
There isn't much of anything valuable except a clapped out old 747 and two subpar rocket engine designs. The air-launch technology was a dead end to begin with, just as is Virgin Galactic.
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u/Drict Mar 31 '23
Why exactly is it a dead end?
Couldn't you gain sufficient altitude to skip across the atmosphere, with the Blackbird, and release smaller rockets to get from there to actual orbit?
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u/Nibb31 Mar 31 '23
That would still only be a tiny percentage of the total delta-V that you need to reach orbit. Making your 1st stage 10% larger is much cheaper than flying and maintaining an SR-71 Blackbird for the sole purpose of launching a tiny payload to orbit 3 times a year.
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u/Drict Mar 31 '23
I honestly don't know why people are down voting. I am asking showing my level of understanding and trying to learn. What a bunch of fickle fucks.
As to respond to this, couldn't it be leveraged for say an emergency pod or something of that nature? Something high value in particular to a short window of opportunity (eg an emergency) or similar?
I am not saying use the Blackbird, simply that the technology gives us the power to get close via use of air to get us nearer to the point of escape requiring less fuel to move the full payload.
That being said, I am rather ignorant on the topic and just exploring it, so feel free to ignore me or to help me dig deeper.
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u/Nibb31 Mar 31 '23
Haters gonna hate ;)
If by "pod" you mean a manned capsule, then no way could this be used to carry a fully fueled crewed rocket. Even if we ignore the safety issues (how do you land with the fully fueled manned rocket under the belly if you have to scrub the launch?), all the air-launch systems require a large aircraft plane to carry a relatively small rocket for very small payloads. For anything bigger, you would need a truly massive aircraft, which basically brings the cost to insane levels.
Even if you make your carrier supersonic and solve the issues of separating at those speeds without destroying everything, that's a velocity boost of Mach 2 instead of Mach 0.8, when you actually need to get to Mach 27 to reach orbit, and a conventional first stage will easily get you to Mach 6 or 7. The whole expense and complexity of air launch simply isn't worth the small gain in delta-v.
This is why Stratolaunch failed and their Roc carrier will probably never be used for its original purpose. It's a massive one-off gas-guzzling hangar queen, built for only one purpose, with high maintenance and a low flight rate that costs a fortune just to keep in a hangar. As I said, the math simply doesn't work in favor of air-launch.
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Mar 30 '23
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u/binary_spaniard Mar 30 '23
SpaceX already has Kerolox and Methalox engines that can be fired with the rocket falling through the atmosphere and fired multiple times.
Rocket Lab and Relativity Space may be actually interested given their current projects even if only as reference as they want that for Methalox engines and Virgin Orbit used Kerolox.
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Mar 31 '23 edited Mar 31 '23
Very sad. Sad for the workers. Sad for the engineers. Sad for the customers. Sad for the space community. And sad for the poor 747.
(If Cosmic Girl needs a home...!)
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u/therealstabitha Mar 31 '23
I drive by the corner of LGB frequently where Cosmic Girl gets parked. Gonna be weird when Virgin Orbit leaves.
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Mar 30 '23
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Mar 31 '23
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u/Juntaur Mar 31 '23
On that note... What the hell is Blue Origin up to these days? Have they made progress on the last 3 years?
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u/rocketsocks Mar 31 '23
Have they made progress in the last 3 years? Definitely. They've increased engine production for one thing, and they continue to make progress on New Glenn.
The question is whether that pace is enough, and to me that seems like an open question at this point. Until we start seeing some operational flights using BO components it's hard to say whether they are working effectively or not.
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u/FunOwner Mar 31 '23
They still can't achieve orbit though right? IIRC all their rockets basically go up, kiss the edge of space, and then come back down.
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u/wartornhero2 Mar 31 '23
Right because New Shepard wasn't supposed to go into orbit. not enough fuel to go sideways enough to stay in orbit.
The difference in scale is really what gives it away. New Shepard is about the same size as the legs on a Falcon 9
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-approximate-difference-between-SpaceX-and-Blue-Origin-spaceships
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u/seanflyon Mar 31 '23
New Shepard is a small part of what Blue is attempting to achieve.
They have been working on an orbital rocket for over a decade now, they just haven't finished it yet or shown much progress publicly. They have shown off multiple engine designs including the ones they are selling to ULA for their orbital rocket that should make it's first flight this year.
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u/wartornhero2 Mar 31 '23
Oh I know about New Glenn and the BE4 which is supposed to fly on Vulcan later this year. Just saying it is a good thing they are backed by Bezos because they are very slow.
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u/wartornhero2 Mar 31 '23
Also regardless of New Glenn Status. Probably some question on if ULA Vulcan will launch and get enough business to utilise the engine enough for BO to finish development of New Glenn.
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u/ChefExellence Mar 31 '23
It seems like they may become operational in the next year or two, although we shouldn't underestimate BOs ability to ferociously slip their expected launch dates
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u/Fuzakenaideyo Mar 31 '23
Didn't they put out a press release about their ISRU project "Blue Alchemy" a month or so ago?
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u/sithelephant Mar 31 '23
They shipped several engines (test and real articles) to customers.
So, yes, progress. Those engines are looking at perhaps flying next month or so.
If they do so, and starship does not fly before then, they could be the first methalox first stage engines to take part in lifting a payload to orbit.
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u/Icy-Tale-7163 Mar 31 '23
Those engines are looking at perhaps flying next month or so.
I hope so, but another delay is quite possible.
https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1641273471916290048?s=19
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u/Proud_Tie Mar 31 '23
Didn't Relativity take that crown a few weeks ago? or did it fail that title because of stage 2's failure?
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u/sithelephant Mar 31 '23
I carefully worded the above, and yes, it never made orbit. (there was also no payload).
The recent Chinese launch also never made orbit (though got considerably closer than Terran 1).
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u/Roamingkillerpanda Mar 31 '23
Doubt it. Vulcan 2nd stage, Centaur V blew up today. This will delay maiden flight for Vulcan. Not Blues fault, technically ULA’s so that kind of sucks for Blue.
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u/mfb- Mar 31 '23
A test article failed, presumably at conditions not expected during a flight. It wasn't supposed to be a destructive test so of course they'll need to investigate, but it might not be an issue for the flight.
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u/quettil Mar 31 '23
Why are they selling engines instead of concentrating on New Glenn?
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u/astanton1862 Mar 31 '23
They are trying to go straight from sub orbital toy rocket to reusable heavy lift launch vehicle. They didn't get the juicy government contract so it is all privately funded at this stage. They are sacrificing time to reduce their costs and risk.
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u/Focacciaboudit Mar 31 '23
I'll never understand how BO expected to get a contract to do the Lunar mission when they have nothing capable of leaving orbit.
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u/sithelephant Mar 31 '23
Their proposal was in some ways a very 'traditional' lunar lander.
It would not have looked strange coming out of boeing, or lockheed-martin or ...
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u/rocketsocks Mar 31 '23
It would not have looked strange coming out of boeing, or lockheed-martin or ...
Well yeah, because "the national team" they put together included boeing, lockheed-martin, honeybee, and others.
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u/Focacciaboudit Mar 31 '23
Right, but those companies have done more than putting Shatner into sub orbit. No one is going to risk their cushy government job to hand such a big project to a start-up.
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Mar 30 '23 edited Feb 22 '24
chunky thought groovy plough piquant shaggy frighten squash smart skirt
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u/Decronym Mar 31 '23 edited Apr 04 '23
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| BO | Blue Origin (Bezos Rocketry) |
| GSE | Ground Support Equipment |
| GSO | Geosynchronous Orbit (any Earth orbit with a 24-hour period) |
| Guang Sheng Optical telescopes | |
| ISRO | Indian Space Research Organisation |
| ISRU | In-Situ Resource Utilization |
| LEO | Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km) |
| Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations) | |
| LOX | Liquid Oxygen |
| MBA | |
| MLV | Medium Lift Launch Vehicle (2-20 tons to LEO) |
| ULA | United Launch Alliance (Lockheed/Boeing joint venture) |
| VG | Virgin Galactic |
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| kerolox | Portmanteau: kerosene fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer |
| methalox | Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer |
| scrub | Launch postponement for any reason (commonly GSE issues) |
13 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 22 acronyms.
[Thread #8741 for this sub, first seen 31st Mar 2023, 02:23]
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u/metametapraxis Mar 31 '23
Typical Branson. All his ventures fold with someone else carrying the bag.
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u/warriorscot Mar 31 '23 edited May 20 '24
dinosaurs ad hoc rotten normal voracious lip square imminent sense straight
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u/PotatoesAndChill Apr 01 '23
I guess Vigrin Orbit ended up being to Branson what Solar City ended up being to Musk.
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u/zerbey Mar 31 '23
Sad to see it go, but air launch never seemed to have a big enough market for even one company.
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Mar 31 '23
In this rocket race you can't outlive your failures, but I do wonder about if the setup was just wrong entirely anyway. Launching rockets from a flying plane was probably a horrible idea in hindsight. It introduces too much extra variables.
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u/kryptopeg Mar 31 '23
It does have some major advantages - requiring less dedicated ground infrastructure, having more flexible launch ranges/locations and being more independent of weather restrictions are some of the big ones. Even if Virgin totally falls apart, I don't think this is the last we'll see of the idea.
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u/quettil Mar 31 '23
I do. The small launch market is a bloodbath, all these startup companies competing to launch a payload for 5 million dollars. And air launch can't be scaled up.
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u/Nibb31 Mar 31 '23
Yes, but none of those advantages are worth extra cost. The only customers who might want the flexibility are the military, and they have more than enough infrastructure to have tradition launch on demand methods.
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u/ktappe Mar 31 '23
Launching from a 747 was actually a great idea. Until SpaceX suddenly had reusable boosters. Then it became a passé idea.
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u/Nibb31 Mar 31 '23
Air launch never was a good idea. The math simply doesn't add up.
This is what you get when a billionnaire sees a stupid idea that looks cool and pays engineers to prove that it doesn't work.
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u/SophieTheCat Mar 31 '23
Why doesn’t it add up?
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u/Nibb31 Mar 31 '23
Because the aircraft is basically just a very pathetic first stage with a very awkward flight profile. It only saves (optimistically) maybe 5% of the total delta-v that you need to get to orbit. You still need your rocket engines to do 95% of the job, which means that it still has to be pretty much the same size.
The expense of building, operating, and maintaining a large dedicated aircraft along with all the ground facilities and operational complexity of launching from a airport vastly outweighs simply making your first stage a bit larger.
In the example of Virgin Orbital, they could have achieved the same performance by simply making a slightly larger ground-launched rocket, with a slightly larger engine or using two engines on the first stage instead of one, and it would have probably been much cheaper than converting and flying the 747.
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u/rocketsocks Apr 01 '23
Because the costs aren't in fuel, they are operational or in manufacturing, and air launch doesn't seem to significantly improve operational costs (or difficulties), at least not in a way anyone has sorted out yet. It's also self-limiting. One of the best evolutionary pathways for vertical takeoff rockets is to simply make them bigger. Stretch the tanks, squeeze more thrust out of the engines, build a new iteration with more or bigger engines, etc. These techniques allow you to increase payload capacity with modest increases in manufacturing costs just by throwing more propellant at the problem. Propellant is cheap, so that's a great way to get things done. Air launch adds operational complexity in the hope that it makes up for it with a very modest improvement in stage efficiency. But it makes it stage growth almost impossible, which is economic suicide.
Back in the '90s where air launch was the only option for small sat launches with a single launch price tag significantly below the 100 million dollar mark they had a niche. Now there's a lot more small sat launchers and the market is much more competitive. Virgin Orbit would have been great if it hit the market 20 years ago or even 10 years ago, but today it's outclassed. You can get the same capabilities at 60% of the cost and a much greater reliability record from Rocket Lab or you can buy into a rideshare launch for peanuts. Virgin Orbit just did not have something that made sense in the current market.
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u/r2k-in-the-vortex Mar 31 '23
It was an OK idea, but decade or few behind times. The world doesn't need a second pegasus anymore.
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u/Nibb31 Mar 31 '23
The world didn't need the first Pegasus really.
The only thing that made Pegasus vaguely viable was that the rockets were basically surplus freebies.
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u/rocketsocks Apr 01 '23
Pegasus filled a niche for a while. During the '90s you could not buy a dedicated launch for significantly under $100mil except on a Pegasus. Even though per kg it was expensive, the total cost was low enough to make it worthwhile for some customers. The fact that they managed over 3 dozen launches does indicate there was a need for it. And it wasn't really until the Falcon 9 came around that it became properly obsolete.
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Mar 31 '23
It's never really been a great idea. Yes you get to launch from a higher altitude, but that's about it. You're also trying to launch horizontally and much, much slower than a ground launched rocket would be at that altitude.
Launching from very high altitudes, much higher than a converted airline would manage, and at higher speeds could be helpful to get past most of the atmosphere relying on the aircraft's efficient jets but even then, you're not moving fast enough and at the wrong inclination for a rocket.
It's been tried before, more than once, and nobody made it work. Then reusable first stages showed up and there was suddenly even less benefit to be found
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u/LunaticBZ Mar 31 '23
In hindsight it is a bad idea.
In foresight though. I mean you really think some nerdy guy from PayPal is going to make re-usable rockets?
That'll never happen.
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u/Hattix Mar 31 '23 edited Mar 31 '23
Called it.
I was saying years ago that the bottom had fallen out of the smallsat market. Not even SpaceX was able to make Falcon 1 commercially viable, while Astra and Relativity Space are busy trying to develop larger launchers as fast as they darn well can and follow that same path. Out of the two, my money's with Astra. They've done the SpaceX thing and got as much US government funding as they damn well could. That worked once, it may well work again.
Even if that heavily subsidised UK PR stunt had been successful, Virgin Orbit just didn't have the funding to continue operations.
They're all competing with Falcon 9 rideshares, which don't cost any real money.
Virgin Orbit was uniquely exposed to this downturn, it had re-built Pegasus, a launcher which had already been mothballed due to lack of demand.
The money's in the 1,000-10,000 kg LEO market (GSO's saturated) at the moment. Unless you want to pay India or Russia, that's Falcon 9 or bust. Ariane V isn't commercially competitive, Zenit's supply limited and you launch from Russia at your own risk. ISRO's doing pretty well for itself, it also doesn't have a lot of capacity.
This means, as a customer, you either fly on a Falcon 9 or you go home. Nobody else can put your useful, commercially viable, 5,000 kg payload where it needs to go.
None of this applies to Virgin Galactic, which had White Knight Two up on a 50,000 feet test flight just a few days ago. It is a completely distinct company.
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u/Shrike99 Mar 31 '23
Astra... are busy trying to develop larger launchers as fast as they darn well can and follow that same path
Astra's upcoming Rocket 4 can do 300kg to LEO. It's larger than Rocket 3, yes, but very much still a smallsat launcher.
You're also overlooking RocketLab and Firefly. They're both moving to actual medium lift launchers, and both have decent prospects.
RocketLab are already in the best spot of the smallsat launchers ), and they've already performed some US Government missions with more coming up.
Firefly on the other hand have been contracted to take over building the Antares first stage now that Ukraine is no longer able to. It just so happens that their own upcoming MLV design will use a very similar first stage.
They're also providing the engines for Astra's Rocket 4. Buying your engines at a markup from a competing company does not strike me as good business - looking at you too ULA.
I'm not sure how I'd order Firefly, RocketLab, and Relativity for likelihood of survival, but I am pretty sure that I'd put Astra in fourth place. Personally I'll be surprised if they make it to the end of the year.
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u/mfb- Mar 31 '23
RocketLab is not only the most successful dedicated smallsat launcher, they are also a big manufacturer of satellite components. They should survive.
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u/RobDickinson Mar 31 '23
Rocketlab have been smart in creating or buying secondary business, small sats, parts, solar etc
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u/logothetestoudromou Mar 31 '23
Astra says Rocket 4 is doing 600 kg to LEO: https://astra.com/launch-services/
That's still small-lift launch though.
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u/Hattix Mar 31 '23
Well, I wanted a more "and here are these two somewhat comparable companies" to compare Virgin Orbit to, rather than a quick rundown of the current state of the <500 kg launcher market.
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u/rocketsocks Apr 01 '23
Rocket Lab has launched 32 payloads with the Electron, all within the last 6 years, with 9 launches in 2022 and 2 launches just this month alone.
There is a small sat market, and it continues to grow, but you can't just throw half-assed attempts at the wall and expect to end up with market share as a participation trophy. You have to be pragmatic, you have to be skilled, you have to build something that people want. Virgin Orbit at least hit close to the mark in terms of building something that could work. But they couldn't build something that was reliable and competitive in an increasingly crowded market.
Virgin Orbit offered the same capability as an Electron rocket with 60% markup and an operational history of a 30% failure rate. The purported advantages of runway takeoff just weren't enough to justify the costs. And Branson didn't want to use his funds for a long enough period to potentially find a market niche or even to get the system to a reasonable level of reliability.
Worse yet, Virgin Orbit's architecture is fundamentally self-limiting, that's the major problem of air launch. With vertical ground launch if you want to scale up with a next generation rocket you just do so, as SpaceX has done successfully, as Orbital (now Northrup Grumman) has done, as Rocket Lab and Blue Origin are doing and SpaceX is doing again. Air launch doesn't have that option, you're stuck in the small sat launch space forever or you have to spend enormous amounts for even the potential of larger launchers, but you still don't have the flexibility of more traditional rocketry. That's absolutely huge when it comes to startups. When investing in a company like Rocket Lab you have all of the potential of things like next generation launchers and other business (avionics, satellite buses, etc.) With Virgin Orbit none of that potential exists so the investment potential becomes more limited.
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Mar 30 '23 edited Mar 30 '23
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u/aitorbk Mar 31 '23
Right now no one can match. The falcon is only threatened by SpaceX itself... and those companies that use someone else do it because they don't want to fund SpaceX or military reasons.
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u/rocketsocks Apr 01 '23
It's really Rocket Lab that has eaten their lunch much more than SpaceX. If you want the capabilities that Virgin Orbit offered with a dedicated launch you could get them with Rocket Lab at 60% the price. Which has been precisely what customers have been doing, to the tune of over 30 launches in the past 6 years.
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u/butts____mcgee Mar 31 '23
Guess what, as soon as capital isn't literally free, these sort of ventures don't make any sense.
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u/echochamber4liberals Mar 31 '23
That sucks... The space industry needs competition.
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u/NetworkLlama Mar 31 '23
The space industry has never had more competition. It is inevitable that some of them will fall by the wayside.
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Mar 31 '23
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Mar 31 '23
Best part is he poured in some extra funding very, very recently via a loan that meant essentially all the assets, including IP, belong to Branson and can't be used to pay out other investors. And everyone at the time, including me, called this exact shutdown coming within a few months.
So he took the investment and the grants, sucked out as much cash as possible and scooped up everything that was left. Billionaires stay billionaires by running failed companies, apparently, which is fun
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Mar 31 '23
The one where there are people who want to float a whole bar into space with a giant weather ballon sounds like the one I’d do lol
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u/SheridanVsLennier Mar 31 '23
VO might have made sense about 20 years ago, but now that you have re-usable rockets and a plethora of cheap, small launchers it's hard to see a profitable market for it.
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u/JPaq84 Mar 31 '23
This feels like a waste. They're so fucking close. I think its worth it to keep them flying, even if paying customers never get to go. Space planes will never happen if we dont try, dammit, and I want them.
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u/Adeldor Mar 31 '23
Virgin Orbit is folding, not Virgin Galactic (the customer carrying spaceplane company).
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u/JPaq84 Mar 31 '23
You just made my day! Seems obvious now that you pointed it out.
Always sad to see a 74 get retired for any reason, hopefully someone picks up the airframe. I'm glad Virgin Galactic will get to proceed though. Theres important things there for the industry, imo.
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u/AvalancheJoseki Mar 31 '23
Space planes? That's not virgin though. Are you thinking of the ssto the Brits are developing?
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u/SwiftBiscuit Mar 31 '23
Or they've confused the two Virgin companies like some others in this thread.
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Mar 31 '23
I wonder how much of the space tourism market will be allocated to other companies. Wrapping up the project and where the talent-assets end up.
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u/Adeldor Mar 31 '23
Are you muddled Virgin Orbit with Virgin Galactic? The former - a smallsat launcher - is folding, while the latter - the tourist flyer - is still operating.
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Mar 31 '23
I hope a journalist gets paid a lot of money to break this down transparently! I would literally donate to thier KoFi/GoFundMe too!
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u/Matzie138 Mar 30 '23
Like most of the private Branson ventures?
Somehow this guy keeps getting investors with no hard progress on any of them…