The first-ever orbital mission to lift off from the United Kingdom did not go as planned.
That flight, the "Start Me Up" mission by Virgin Orbit, started out well enough. The company's carrier plane, known as Cosmic Girl, lifted off from Spaceport Cornwall here on schedule Monday (Jan. 9) at 5:02 p.m. EST (22:02 GMT).
Cosmic Girl dropped Virgin Orbit's 70-foot-long (21 meters) LauncherOne rocket at 6:09 p.m. EST (2309 GMT), while the plane was off Ireland's southwest coast. The rocket's first stage did its job, and LauncherOne's two stages separated as planned about 3.5 minutes after the drop.
The rocket's upper stage finished a nearly five-minute burn shortly thereafter, then went into a long coast. It was during this phase that we learned something had gone wrong.
"It appears that LauncherOne has suffered an anomaly, which will prevent us from making orbit this mission," Virgin Orbit's Chris Relf, director of systems engineering and verification, said during a webcast of the mission. Details were not immediately available.
The failure resulted in the loss of nine satellites. Those payloads are an in-orbit manufacturing experiment by the U.K. company Space Forge; several U.K. defense cubesats, including two for studying the ionosphere, the upper layer of Earth's atmosphere where space weather occurs; and an experimental global navigation satellite co-funded by the European Space Agency.
