Virgin Orbit Pauses Operations For a Week, Furloughs Nearly Entire Staff (cnbc.com) 32
Virgin Orbit is furloughing nearly all its employees and pausing operations for a week as it looks for a funding lifeline, people familiar with the matter told CNBC. From the report: Company executives briefed staff on the situation in an all-hands meeting at 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday, according to people who were in the meeting. The furlough is unpaid, though employees can cash in PTO, with only a small team continuing to work. Virgin Orbit is also moving up payroll by a week to Friday. In the all-hands, company leaders told employees that they aimed to provide an update on the furlough and funding situation by next Wednesday or Thursday, according to the people, who asked to remain anonymous to discuss internal matters.
The rocket-building company developed a system that uses a modified 747 jet to send satellites into space by dropping a rocket from under the aircraft's wing mid-flight. But the company's last mission suffered a mid-flight failure, with an issue during the launch causing the rocket to not reach orbit and crash into the ocean. "Our investigation is nearly complete and our next production rocket with the needed modification incorporated is in final stages of integration and test," Virgin Orbit's spokesperson said.
The rocket-building company developed a system that uses a modified 747 jet to send satellites into space by dropping a rocket from under the aircraft's wing mid-flight. But the company's last mission suffered a mid-flight failure, with an issue during the launch causing the rocket to not reach orbit and crash into the ocean. "Our investigation is nearly complete and our next production rocket with the needed modification incorporated is in final stages of integration and test," Virgin Orbit's spokesperson said.
Cheap, efficient on-demand launch. (Score:2, Insightful)
They are not competing with Spacex, they are complementary.
The problem they had with the last launch was a broken fuel filter, not a fundamental design flaw.
Surely someone wants to invest in that ?
Re:Cheap, efficient on-demand launch. (Score:5, Insightful)
They are not competing with Spacex, they are complementary.
Both SpaceX and Virgin Orbit launch Cubesats. So they compete directly. The big difference is that SpaceX is cheaper and more reliable. Hence, Virgin Orbit's financial problems.
The problem they had with the last launch was a broken fuel filter, not a fundamental design flaw.
Not a design flaw, but a design process flaw. The fuel filter should have been fixed during the "testing to failure" stage.
The problem is that Virgin Orbit, like NASA and Blue Origin, doesn't test to failure, preferring the "zero defect" mentality that blew up two shuttles and killed 14 astronauts.
Surely someone wants to invest in that ?
Feel free to send them a check. I'll pass.
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Virgin Orbit will offer launch-on-demand. Spacex does not. You have to read ALL the words.
The problem was nothing to do with test-to-failure.
Re:Cheap, efficient on-demand launch. (Score:5, Informative)
Virgin Orbit will offer launch-on-demand. Spacex does not.
Something completely irrelevant in the industry. This isn't (ironically) Amazon. You don't need to get that cubesat up tomorrow in an unplanned activity. It's just a fancy marketing term, nothing more. There's nothing "on demand" about putting anything in space even if there were a company you can call up and say "Yo, I need my shit shot up tomorrow!"
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I suspect the military would view it differently.
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No they wouldn't. They don't have a set of satellites sitting around on the ground just waiting for someone to drop ship to space.
It takes a while to build something to launch it to space, they plan the launch.
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https://spacenews.com/launch-on-demand-if-satellites-are-shot-down-will-space-force-be-ready-to-restock/
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The military routinely have extra spyware sitting around in case they need to get something into a special orbit quickly. But it costs big bucks to do.
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It's only money. They can print more.
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I realise most cube sats are highly engineered, but
The failure rate on cubesats is nearly 50% [smithsonianmag.com]. No, they aren't "highly engineered". The whole point of cubesats is to be able to throw something together and see if it works.
Military wants launch on demand (Score:2)
No they [the military] wouldn't [want launch on demand]. They don't have a set of satellites sitting around on the ground just waiting for someone to drop ship to space. It takes a while to build something to launch it to space, they plan the launch.
The military very much wants launch on demand, and is funding multiple programs to give them capability to do exactly that. Yes, they do want to have satellites sitting on the ground waiting for the command "we need this satellite in this orbit right now!" and ready to go. They want to be able to replace a complete constellation in 48 hours if an adversary decides to take satellites out.
...But... the military isn't Virgin Orbit's customer.
In general, yes, Virgin Orbit competes with SpaceX ride-share for
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Virgin Orbit will offer launch-on-demand.
Very few people care about launch-on-demand, and even fewer are willing to pay for it.
Re:Cheap, efficient on-demand launch. (Score:4, Insightful)
SpaceX isn't cheaper than Virgin Orbit, at least not if Virgin Orbit works.
VO is designed to be cheap for low mass satellites. SpaceX sometimes offers lower cost deployment for small sats, but only as a ride-along for other bigger payloads, which means limited choice of orbits and timing.
They are serving different market segments. VO just ran out of money, that's all. The small sat end of the market isn't as lucrative as the big sat end.
Re: Cheap, efficient on-demand launch. (Score:1)
Re:Cheap, efficient on-demand launch. (Score:4, Interesting)
Virgin Orbit offers expensive, inconvenient, unreliable launches.
For instance, Electron costs *half* of what a LauncherOne will cost you, and RocketLab is more reliable, has more launches under their belt, and offers a fantastic truly customer-oriented system.
The supposed advantages of air-launch aren't such. First of all, it's for the most part a lie. "It's just a plane, so we can launch anywhere". Well, except you do need pretty much all facilities except for a launch tower at your airport. And you need authorizations from everyone, from the FAA to the airport itself, local authorities, etc. Launching from another country? Even more bureaucracy. And it'll only be ok if it's a NATO country and the US gives the Ok for it (because ITAR). So all of those advantages evaporate fairly quickly.
If you want cheaper, and your orbit allows it, you can get on a SpaceX ridesharing mission. Anywhere from 300k to around 2 to 3 million for the max payload capacity that LauncherOne can handle. And you're launching on the most reliable rocket in history.
The problem with their last launch is a fundamental flaw, not necessarily on design, but on how they do things. Their processes are horrible. Sure, they aren't the same company as Virgin Galactic now, but they used to be, and they obviously inherited the same culture.
VO was already not very appealing, but now there are even more options, and more are coming. VO hasn't gone the way of Astra yet for the same reason BO isn't out of business: A big ego with big pockets behind it.
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Space is hard (Score:3)
Re:Space is hard (Score:4)
You might not have a choice about quitting if the money runs out.
Re:Space is hard (Score:4, Informative)
SpaceX rockets failed repeatedly before getting it right.
That was intentional. SpaceX took TDD, a software technique based on trying to fail, and applied it to launching rockets. They blew up a lot of rockets, but they learned the weaknesses and error margins.
Virgin Orbit, along with NASA and Blue Origin, uses a "zero defect" model that tries to do everything perfectly the first time. That requires a very slow and careful design process, and in the end, much less reliable rockets because they have no idea how close to failure they are, or which devices are least reliable.
It's like trying to design reliable software by coding very carefully instead of running unit tests.
SpaceX failed. A lot. [Re:Space is hard] (Score:3)
There's a problem of perception here. SpaceX stated up front that they were going to blow some stuff up before they were successful,
That is the opposite of the truth. Before the first launch, Elon Musk stated very publicly that Falcon-1 would be the most reliable rocket ever built starting with the very first launch, that it had been engineered for reliability and it would achieve 99.9% reliability (yes, that's right: 1 in a thousand failures) from the very first launch.
Yes, he was clueless. He had never flown a rocket, and didn't have any idea; he thought that simply saying "design it to be reliable, dudes" was enough to make it relia
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There's a difference between failing because you're trying to fail, and failing because you failed to get everything perfect. SpaceX did the former, Virgin do the latter. A failure for them is a big deal, they aren't acting like an agile startup.
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SpaceX rockets failed repeatedly before getting it right. Each flight get a bit further. Its how it works. Losing the first rockets means you know how to build the next one better. You can't just quit because of one and only one 'failure'.
But they did succeed years ago and cratered the cost of launch and therefore profit for successive companies. SpaceX now has a cheap, reliable delivery system. To beat them you need an either cheaper or more reliable delivery system and investors will wonder how you are going to deliver that and still give them a return on risk/investment.
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To beat them you need an either cheaper or more reliable delivery system and investors will wonder how you are going to deliver that and still give them a return on risk/investment.
Especially while you're retiring all of the risk on a new design, meaning you'll be having your own expensive failures.
There are a couple of companies trying it, going the same route SpaceX did by starting with the small scale on the order of Falcon 1, to avoid the expense and physical difficulty of moving the bigger things around. They're still having to eat failure costs. How long that will continue is anybody's guess, but they've already stuck with it through more failure than Branson.
Personally I thin
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>SpaceX rockets failed repeatedly before getting it right
They didn't, though. There is a HUGE difference between test flights and production flights.
Falcon 1 scheduled several test flights. This where test flights, designed as such, and carrying accordingly mass-simulators, broken satellites, or a bloody wheel of cheese. Their first few failed, which was expected, and not a concern, as this are test flights. Then they reached orbit succesfully, and so they went into production. Their next flight was a pr
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They did fail a bunch of times, but because they were expecting to fail, they didn't blow up a bunch of payloads.
By planning not to fail, they might have blown up less rockets, but they probably would have blown up more payloads, and it would have cost more and taken longer too.
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>SpaceX rockets failed repeatedly before getting it right
They didn't, though.
They most assuredly did. They failed three times before they got their first success.
Virgin Orbit did a little better, reaching orbit on their second test launch. SpaceX had a record of 3 failures in their first 5 launches. Virgin Orbit has a record of 2 failures in their first 6 launches.
There is a HUGE difference between test flights and production flights. Falcon 1 scheduled several test flights.
Falcon 1's very first flight was for a paying customer, the US Air Force.
This where test flights, designed as such, and carrying accordingly mass-simulators, broken satellites, or a bloody wheel of cheese. Their first few failed, which was expected, and not a concern, as this are test flights. Then they reached orbit succesfully, and so they went into production. Their next flight was a production flight, and worked flawlessly too.
Next flight... and also their last flight. It never flew again. Having a rocket with a demonstrated 25% success rate in an industry that demanded 90
Richard Branson (Score:5, Interesting)
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This is 100% the reason. Branson has moved on to another ego stroking adventure.
In other words . . . (Score:2)
In other words . . .
. . . He's lost in space!
[or is it, "He's lost his space"?]