![Branson dug the 747 aircraft acquired by Virgin Orbit.](https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/IMG_0280-640x427.jpg)
Branson dug the 747 aircraft acquired by Virgin Orbit.
Eric Berger
It’s now official—the launch company Virgin Orbit is being sold for parts. In a brand new filing as a part of the bankruptcy process, Rocket Lab purchased the corporate’s foremost production facility in Long Beach, California, to support its Neutron rocket. Stratolaunch bought Virgin Orbit’s Boeing 747 aircraft and related equipment. And Launcher acquired the corporate’s lease on a test site in Mojave.
That is it. After six years, Virgin Orbit is completed, and its LauncherOne will fly no more. The aim of this text isn’t to criticize the corporate’s technology or employees. In fact, the engineering teams did an impressive job of getting a liquid-fueled rocket to drop from a 747 aircraft, ignite its engine, and reach space.
No, the issue was Virgin Orbit’s management, including Chief Executive Officer Dan Hart and its founder, Sir Richard Branson. As a result of their leadership, the corporate had a terrible, unsupportable marketing strategy and compounded those issues by hiring an unsustainable workforce of 700 people.
Origins
Virgin Orbit originated greater than a decade ago as an offshoot of Virgin Galactic, which was using an aircraft as a primary stage to launch a suborbital space plane for tourists. In its early years, the corporate hired several engineers from SpaceX to start designing a rocket that might be dropped from an aircraft.
This business ran fairly lean until Virgin Orbit was separated from its parent company in 2017, and Branson hired Hart, who had spent a long time as a system engineer at Boeing’s Space division as its president. Hart instituted a more cautious approach and commenced staffing up the corporate. A planned first launch in 2018 was delayed by greater than two years.
When LauncherOne finally took flight for the primary time in May 2020, the corporate had spent a staggering sum of money, nearly $1 billion, developing the rocket and air-launch system. It was clear on the time that Virgin Orbit was never going to make that a reimbursement by charging $12 million to $15 million to launch just a few hundred kilograms per mission.
It also seemed fairly obvious that, with the massive workforce Hart hired, Virgin Orbit was not going to interrupt even. The corporate’s human resources bill alone was likely about $150 million per yr, and that didn’t include facilities, leases, equipment, and hardware costs. Assuming a profit of $10 million per launch—an exceedingly generous figure—Virgin Orbit would should launch something like 30 times a yr to interrupt even.
There clearly was no marketplace for this, and even reaching such a cadence would have required several years. Rocket Lab, which has a proven, similarly sized vehicle in Electron, is barely seeing a requirement for a few dozen flights per yr to dedicated orbits. SpaceX, with its Transporter rideshare missions, was also eating into Virgin Orbit’s market. The business case simply didn’t close.