Britain's first rocket launch failed - along with LauncherOne, Virgin Orbit shares fell

Unfortunately, Virgin Orbit's first attempt at a debut rocket launch in British history ended in failure. The Start Me Up mission began well, but then something went wrong.

Here's What We Know

On January 10 at 18:02 (EDT) or 15:02 (PDT), the Cosmic Girl took off from the spaceport in Cornwall. It is a modification of the Boeing 747, designed specifically for rocket launches. At an altitude of over 10 km, the LauncherOne rocket successfully separated from the plane. By that time, the Cosmic Girl was already flying over the southwest coast of Ireland.

210 seconds after the main engines were launched, the first stage successfully separated from the rocket. Virgin Orbit posted on Twitter about the successful exit to orbit. However, the post was deleted.

As it turned out, after the launch of the second stage engine there was an "unknown anomaly" that caused the mission failure. Virgin Orbit has launched an investigation into the incident.

The fall of LauncherOne caused the company's stock to plummet. The value of securities fell by 25%. Note that Virgin Orbit was able to make four successful launches in its history. But all of them were carried out from California. Previously, the company said that in the case of failure the British launch will be repeated before the end of January.