Cosmic Girl, a Virgin Boeing 747-400 aircraft sits on the tarmac with Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket attached to the wing, ahead of the primary UK launch tonight, at Spaceport Cornwall at Newquay Airport in Newquay, Britain, January 9, 2023.
Henry Nicholls | Reuters
Virgin Orbit stock fell in trading on Monday evening, after the corporate confirmed that its first launch out of the UK failed to achieve orbit.
Shares of Virgin Orbit fell as much as 30% in after-hours trading, from its previous close of $1.93 a share.
The corporate uses a modified 747 jet to send satellites into space, by dropping a rocket from under the aircraft’s wing mid-flight – a technique generally known as air launch.
Virgin Orbit’s webcast showed its LauncherOne rocket released and fired its engine, with the corporate saying in a tweet that the rocket “successfully reached Earth orbit.” But about half an hour later, the corporate announced the launch had “an anomaly” and that the nine satellites onboard wouldn’t reach orbit.
Virgin Orbit is reviewing the launch data to discover the source of the failure, and acknowledged that it deleted the tweet about reaching orbit. The 747 jet and its crew safely returned and landed at Spaceport Cornwall in southwest England.
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Monday’s mission was Virgin Orbit’s sixth thus far, and its second launch failure.
The corporate conducted just two launches in 2022, wanting the forecast for 4 to 6 missions that Virgin Orbit gave firstly of last 12 months. At the tip of the third quarter, Virgin Orbit had $71.2 million in money available, and raised an extra $25 million from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, an existing major shareholder, in the midst of the fourth quarter.
