South West England from the 25th July 2014. Landsat 8 imagery courtesy of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and U.S. Geological Survey

This blog changed significantly at 11.46pm on Monday evening with the tweet from Virgin Orbit ‘We appear to have an anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit. We are evaluating the information.’ This was the moment when the hopes of the UK, Cornwall, and Spaceport Cornwall to deliver the first successful satellite launch from the UK and Western European soil were dashed.

As we’re sure people are aware, the aim was to take a payload of nine Cubesats via a horizontal launch from Newquay in Cornwall. The launch process began with Cosmic Girl – an adapted Boeing 747 plane – taking off carrying the LauncherOne missile. The plane flew out past the south west coast of Ireland, where it the dropped the missile to take the satellites into orbit. At least, that was the plan.

Despite Newquay only being around 60 miles from our office, like many others we spent the evening watching the Virgin Orbit livestream of the launch.  The official stream and commentary was not the best we’d watched, and so we later settled on the Airliners Live feed of the stream that was more interesting and interactive.

The crowd cheered as the plane took off just after 10pm, and everything went smoothly as it reached the launch site and the missile was released just after 11pm – although the livestream didn’t seem to be aware that this was happening until the missile was well on its way! The telemetry on the livestream worked initially and then got sketchy, blamed on the changing ground stations, until it consistently showed the missile speed as zero miles per hour, occasionally showing it over a billion miles per hour! Everything seemed to be going well until the announcement about the anomaly. There was some confusion with the non-space expert commentators as to what that meant, whilst those of us in the industry knew exactly. It meant that, like the surfers who frequent Newquay’s Fistral beach, this launch had been wiped out.

Early on Tuesday morning, Virgin Orbit released a statement that indicated the missile’s first stage worked as expected and the second stage ignited, but at some point during the second stage burn an anomaly occurred whilst the rocket was travelling at over 11,000 miles per hour. The telemetry also seemed to indicate the rocket was falling when it froze, as it indicated the missile was only at 75 km. The teams involved are currently analysing the huge amount of data collected, and it will likely to be a few weeks before it is known exactly what occurred. (Post Blog Note: A second statement released on 12th January indicates that in fact the the first burn of the upper stage ended prematurely).

The second statement also noted that that the rocket and the payload fell back to Earth, as LauncherOne only reached an altitude of around 180 km.

It is hugely disappointing for everyone involved that this has occurred but, at the risk of repeating a lot of the clichés that have said since Monday, these things happen. Space is a challenging environment to operate within, these are not first, nor will they be the last, satellites to be lost during launch. To give context, launch failures occur more frequently than you’d probably expect; for example, over the last six months:

In August:

• India Space Research Organisation’s Small Satellite Launch Vehicle faced difficulties in its final stage and failed to deliver its payload of satellites into the correct orbit.

In October:

• Skyrora, a European launch start up company, was testing its Skyrora XL vehicle off Iceland, but it did not reach the target 125 kilometres altitude and it fell into the Norwegian Sea,
• Japan’s Epsilon rocket ran into difficulties during the third stage and the mission controllers terminated the rocket.

In December:

• China’s private commercial company Landspace’s Zhuque 2 launch vehicle didn’t reach orbit due an issue affecting the second stage, which meant the 14 satellites failed to reach orbit and fell into the ocean.
• Pleiades Neo 5 and 6 satellites were lost during launch as Europe’s Vega-C rocket, taking them into space, crashed into the ocean shortly after take-off.

The first launch attempt from Cornwall has been unsuccessful, but they have achieved so much with this attempt and will have learnt so much more. The operation will also have inspired the next generation space scientists and rocket engineers seeing this happen in their local community. Once the investigation is over, and it’s known what happened, hopefully, the team will go again. We look forward to watching that successful launch!