The collapse of Virgin Orbit spells probable doom for its sister company, Virgin Galactic—for one very big reason.
Shortly before midnight on Jan. 9, a camera on the Canary Islands operated by the Spanish Meteor Network caught a spectacular fireball plunging into the Atlantic Ocean. Although it looked a lot like a meteor, it wasn’t.Much more was burning up than a lot of expensive rocketry and cargo.
The underlying problem is that Galactic and Orbit shared the same fundamental concept for launching rockets: air launch. Instead of launching from a static pad, the launches were from airborne motherships at heights of 40,000 feet or more. That removed the need for huge booster rockets needed to accelerate from ground level to the stratosphere. In the case of Galactic, this enabled crewed flights into suborbital space; and of Orbit, for delivering small satellite payloads into orbit.
Imagine is the right word. All of this reflects a serious disconnect between the frequent hyped announcements of a future fleet of more advanced ships regularly lofting “space tourists” to the edge of space and the hard reality of what remains a prolonged experiment to prove the concept. Finding new backers has been difficult. Galactic and Orbit both raised funding by going to the market using the fleetingly fashionable device of a special purpose acquisition, SPAC, otherwise known as the blank check offering, where the normal stock exchange scrutiny of an independent public offering was evaded and investors were asked to accept in good faith wildly optimistic profit forecasts.
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