Is there any concern about debris falling to earth from this failed attempt? Or will it burn up before then?
>The company tweeted: “LauncherOne has … successfully reached Earth orbit! Our mission isn’t over yet, but our congratulations to the people of the UK! This is already the first-ever orbital mission from British soil – an enormous achievement.”
>
>Twenty-eight minutes later it tweeted: “We appear to have an anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit. We are evaluating the information.”
>
>The plane, Cosmic Girl, returned safely to Cornwall.
A poundland space program for a poundland country. Why do we bother.
So many rocket scientists commenting on here, if only they were working on the project sharing their expertise then this might have been avoided…
These comments sum up r/uk perfectly. Instantly jumping down the throat to claim how crap this country is. The reality is this launch was not a UK system. Virgin Orbit is a US company, and like every US aerospace company you can’t even work there if you’re a UK citizen (unless you are dual US-UK).
The media have drastically overplayed how ‘home-grown’ this is. The UK aspect was the ground infrastructure to create the ‘spaceport’. Which, given it was already an airport runway long enough, seems to basically be the integration facility (attaching the spacecraft to the rocket). Many of those spacecraft were UK designed and made however. The spaceport itself behaved perfectly well, as has this exact launch system the previous 4 times. The anomaly and failure in this is not a demonstration that the UK is useless. It just reinforces that space is, indeed, hard.
Quite weird seeing all these incels in the comments rubbing one out over the failure.
Well we were able to do this in the ‘60s. (Blue Streak/Black Knight/Black Prince)
Didn’t realise the UK had so many experts in this field. It’s a wonder it failed.
Having recently started playing Kerbal Space Program, I feel qualified to say what went wrong here.
… that’s complete bullshit. The game is insanely complex and has given me a newfound respect for the intricacies of space flight.
Putting all the really weird patriotism/anti-patriotism around this aside…would be interesting to know what the anomaly was. When they announced it has reached orbit it surely was on the correct flight path so what could have changed? Maybe it was 99.9% of the way and they assumed it would make it?
Space is hard.
Was watching the stream, telemetry glitched out a few times in rather alarming ways.
At one point altitude was a massively negative integer (looked like software bugs), and at another point reported speed was many times faster than the speed of light.
During flight it also looked like the gimballing on S2 was having a bad time, making a lot of erratic movements that could easily have fucked its steering up. A few aerospace engineers on t’internet commented on this with varying levels of “uh that’s alarming”.
I feel pretty bad for all the engineers who worked on this, and hope they publish a postmortem when they work out what went tits up.
Disappointing.
Partially the failed launch and partially the usual shit in this sub celebrating a UK failure because, Brexit. Jeez
It would have been more fun if they’d fitted some cameras and captured…anything at all. The Virgin YouTube feed was dire in its lack of content and tech detail.
I’d have really enjoyed a cockpit video!
And that control room! Did they borrow the office from a DVLA test centre?
Still…planes and spaceports and rockets. Cool stuff.
I stayed up to watch the live stream. It was not thrilling; they’d clearly watched recent NASA and SpaceX launches and wanted to put on a show but hadn’t really considered how. It was shit.
Remind me again, how many times Elon’s rockets failed ?
Isn’t that pretty normal for a first launch? As long as they have the data, and can figure out what went wrong, it served its purpose. Shame about the satellites.
Some really disheartening comments.
We’re a newbie to the party and going to space is still bloody difficult. Hopefully the team has gotten some useful data from this and are better prepared next time.
They made it to the lagrange point to install the batteries to moon base laboratory.
Them talking about that it failed, so you wouldn’t about the secret government projects.
Unfortunately, statistically, a quarter of people fail to get it up
An amazingly difficult and horrendously straining mission that tests the best in each and every person of every field involved, failed.
Unfortunately these things happen. That’s it. Stop trying to attach this to an agenda.
You have to fail before you succeed in life… just look at Messi. Couldn’t win a final to save his life, now he’s champion of the soccer world.
Chill out guys, Elon Musks SpaceX rockets failed a bunch of times
God this sub is cancer. Got further than NASAs first ever attempt
Replace fail with deferred success. Being positive occasionally is not rocket science.
It was a disappointing start with that awful live stream.
25 comments
Is there any concern about debris falling to earth from this failed attempt? Or will it burn up before then?
>The company tweeted: “LauncherOne has … successfully reached Earth orbit! Our mission isn’t over yet, but our congratulations to the people of the UK! This is already the first-ever orbital mission from British soil – an enormous achievement.”
>
>Twenty-eight minutes later it tweeted: “We appear to have an anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit. We are evaluating the information.”
>
>The plane, Cosmic Girl, returned safely to Cornwall.
A poundland space program for a poundland country. Why do we bother.
So many rocket scientists commenting on here, if only they were working on the project sharing their expertise then this might have been avoided…
These comments sum up r/uk perfectly. Instantly jumping down the throat to claim how crap this country is. The reality is this launch was not a UK system. Virgin Orbit is a US company, and like every US aerospace company you can’t even work there if you’re a UK citizen (unless you are dual US-UK).
The media have drastically overplayed how ‘home-grown’ this is. The UK aspect was the ground infrastructure to create the ‘spaceport’. Which, given it was already an airport runway long enough, seems to basically be the integration facility (attaching the spacecraft to the rocket). Many of those spacecraft were UK designed and made however. The spaceport itself behaved perfectly well, as has this exact launch system the previous 4 times. The anomaly and failure in this is not a demonstration that the UK is useless. It just reinforces that space is, indeed, hard.
Quite weird seeing all these incels in the comments rubbing one out over the failure.
Well we were able to do this in the ‘60s. (Blue Streak/Black Knight/Black Prince)
Didn’t realise the UK had so many experts in this field. It’s a wonder it failed.
Having recently started playing Kerbal Space Program, I feel qualified to say what went wrong here.
… that’s complete bullshit. The game is insanely complex and has given me a newfound respect for the intricacies of space flight.
Putting all the really weird patriotism/anti-patriotism around this aside…would be interesting to know what the anomaly was. When they announced it has reached orbit it surely was on the correct flight path so what could have changed? Maybe it was 99.9% of the way and they assumed it would make it?
Space is hard.
Was watching the stream, telemetry glitched out a few times in rather alarming ways.
At one point altitude was a massively negative integer (looked like software bugs), and at another point reported speed was many times faster than the speed of light.
During flight it also looked like the gimballing on S2 was having a bad time, making a lot of erratic movements that could easily have fucked its steering up. A few aerospace engineers on t’internet commented on this with varying levels of “uh that’s alarming”.
I feel pretty bad for all the engineers who worked on this, and hope they publish a postmortem when they work out what went tits up.
Disappointing.
Partially the failed launch and partially the usual shit in this sub celebrating a UK failure because, Brexit. Jeez
It would have been more fun if they’d fitted some cameras and captured…anything at all. The Virgin YouTube feed was dire in its lack of content and tech detail.
I’d have really enjoyed a cockpit video!
And that control room! Did they borrow the office from a DVLA test centre?
Still…planes and spaceports and rockets. Cool stuff.
I stayed up to watch the live stream. It was not thrilling; they’d clearly watched recent NASA and SpaceX launches and wanted to put on a show but hadn’t really considered how. It was shit.
Remind me again, how many times Elon’s rockets failed ?
Isn’t that pretty normal for a first launch? As long as they have the data, and can figure out what went wrong, it served its purpose. Shame about the satellites.
Some really disheartening comments.
We’re a newbie to the party and going to space is still bloody difficult. Hopefully the team has gotten some useful data from this and are better prepared next time.
They made it to the lagrange point to install the batteries to moon base laboratory.
Them talking about that it failed, so you wouldn’t about the secret government projects.
Unfortunately, statistically, a quarter of people fail to get it up
An amazingly difficult and horrendously straining mission that tests the best in each and every person of every field involved, failed.
Unfortunately these things happen. That’s it. Stop trying to attach this to an agenda.
You have to fail before you succeed in life… just look at Messi. Couldn’t win a final to save his life, now he’s champion of the soccer world.
Chill out guys, Elon Musks SpaceX rockets failed a bunch of times
God this sub is cancer. Got further than NASAs first ever attempt
Replace fail with deferred success. Being positive occasionally is not rocket science.
It was a disappointing start with that awful live stream.