The Astronomy Thread

lol this is why no livestream.

Basically nobody cares about Virgin Orbit/LauncherOne, so a test failure that you only read about and can't see doesn't really generate bad publicity.

Cad said:

The whole, landing the first stage and re-using it business makes having a 747-launched vehicle pretty much pointless.

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Particularly when the 747 isnt catching on re-entry. Or was this thing supposed to land itself?

Cad said:

As far as I know they are not intended to be re-entry vehicles, they are sat payloads. The "first stage" is in this case the 747, which then lands. The other stages are disposable.

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That actually makes perfect sense. I feel much less clever....thanks

Cad said:

The whole, landing the first stage and re-using it business makes having a 747-launched vehicle pretty much pointless.

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Falcon's first stage can't be reused indefinitely, we'll see how well Musk's claim of 100 uses holds up. The turn-around on the 747 is also much quicker than the turn-around on Falcon's first stage (I would assume), so the bottleneck would be the speed at which second stages/payloads can be constructed.

I mean it's not a super ambitious project in the grand scheme of human spaceflight, but they might carve themselves out a niche as the cheapest way to put small satellites in orbit. The information learned might also be useful as a stepping stone towards a custom airframe stage, rather than just trying to dive into it headfirst like StratoLaunch.