{"id":54179,"date":"2023-01-17T20:06:29","date_gmt":"2023-01-17T12:06:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/uk-space-ceos-and-virgin-orbit-customers-address-the-launch-failure\/"},"modified":"2023-01-17T20:06:29","modified_gmt":"2023-01-17T12:06:29","slug":"uk-space-ceos-and-virgin-orbit-customers-address-the-launch-failure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/uk-space-ceos-and-virgin-orbit-customers-address-the-launch-failure\/","title":{"rendered":"UK Space CEOs and Virgin Orbit Customers Address the Launch Failure"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/p>\n

It has been quite a week for the UK space industry. What was meant to mark a new era of space launch has sadly been put on hold after Virgin Orbit<\/strong>\u2019s launch failure just over a week ago. The mission, \u201cStart Me Up,\u201d suffered a failure on Monday Jan. 9, and an investigation is underway to find the result of anomaly. Virgin Orbit has said it hopes to return to the newly inaugurated Spaceport Cornwall in the future.<\/p>\n

Via Satellite<\/strong> spoke to two of the customers on the mission, In-Space Missions<\/strong> and Space Forge<\/strong>, about the setback.<\/p>\n

In-Space Missions designed and built the primary payload \u2014 two Prometheus-2 satellites alongside Airbus Defence for the U.K. Ministry of Defense\u2019s Defense Science & Technology Laboratory. Doug Liddle, CEO of In-Space Missions, spoke to Via Satellite<\/em> the morning after the failed launch and admitted he had been in a \u201cbad place\u201d and going through \u201cvarious stages of grief\u201d when reality hit. Yet despite this setback, he believes there is much to be proud of.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a bit like when the Olympics comes to a country, you create this ecosystem. A lot of stuff gathers around it, and even though the Olympics is finished, you are left with something. There is a legacy. The legacy is really strong down in Cornwall and the United Kingdom. Nobody is turning around and saying we are not going to do this again. Everyone is desperate to do this again. It plays really well to the British spirit. If something goes wrong, you have the plucky Brit mentality and say and \u2018We are going to fix it,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Liddle would still launch with Virgin Orbit in the future. \u201cI would launch with them from Mojave, New Mexico tomorrow,\u201d Liddle said. \u201cWould I launch from them out of the U.K.? They have really good people. As soon as they understand what caused the failure and fix that process, I would launch with them. You can look at every launch vehicle \u2014 all of them have had failures. You figure it out and do it right next time. You have just seen Arianespace Vega C fail and that is seen as gold-plated. It hasn\u2019t put me off Virgin Orbit.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for In-Space Missions, this is not the first time in recent times it has been on the wrong end of a failed launch. In 2020, the company lost a satellite when a Rocket Lab mission failed. Liddle compares the impact of the two failed missions on In-Space Missions\u2019 business. While In-Space Missions developed the satellite for the Virgin Orbit Launch, the end customer was the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. Liddle said there is not much financial impact for In-Space this time.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Rocket Lab one hit us worst. We were a smaller company. We didn\u2019t have a big brother owner at that time. We were much more financially fragile. Once we launched, we were going to deliver services from that satellite. That was tough, really tough,\u201d he said. \u201cThis one was less so. It is very painful for our customer. It is more on a personal level. There is a pride. We wanted to showcase what we had. We don\u2019t know the impact of future business growth and work. It is unknown what the impact will be from that perspective. Financially, there is not much impact really.\u201d<\/p>\n

Liddle admits it felt like \u201cGroundhog Day\u201d as history was sadly repeating itself for In-Space Missions. He recalled stepping out of the tent where there was a big screen showing the launch and his chief engineer coming up to him to tell him what was going on.<\/p>\n

He added, \u201cMy chief engineer came out, and told us that the second stage had not made it to orbit and I assumed he was making a weird joke, and he said \u2018I would not joke about this.\u2019 It was just this heartstopping moment. I kind of felt all the difficult stuff had happened, the plane dropping that rocket off was a really hard thing to do and they had done that, and that had worked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Space Forge<\/strong>, an exciting United Kingdom space startup, was another customer on the mission. The company, founded in 2018, is developing a fully returnable and relaunchable satellite platform, to unlock the benefits of space for manufacturing and experimentation at scale. The key technology it is developing is centered on making access to space as easy as possible and managing how to return platforms from space.<\/p>\n

Joshua Western, CEO and Co-founder of Space Forge admitted to Via Satellite<\/em> that his team is \u201cdevastated\u201d by what happened. He said while the launch failure was a \u201csurprise\u201d it was not a \u201ctotal shock.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe designed, built, and qualified this satellite in five months \u2014 which was no mean feat. But we are looking forward. Our ForgeStar-1 is due to be launched later this year, and that is a more capable satellite and will be the demonstration of in-space manufacturing capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Western does not believe this failed launch will have a lasting repercussion on the U.K. space industry.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpace is hard, and everyone in the industry knows that. This was an incredible opportunity for us to have been a part of a historic first for the U.K. and we will without a doubt launch a ForgeStar platform from the U.K. when the opportunity presents itself again,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Like In-Space Missions, Space Forge retains a strong confidence in Virgin Orbit. \u201cWe are in an industry where this is part of the process. We are by no way deterred from launching with Virgin Orbit again. We back them and everything they stand for \u2014 providing agile access to space and ensuring space is used for good. If anything, I now have more confidence in selecting Virgin Orbit as a launch partner. They\u2019ll fix the issue and will have a more reliable launcher,\u201d Western said.<\/p>\n

Western said as this was a test mission, the impact to Space Forge could have been greater. The company has its next launch lined up for later in the year and is on track with delivery. It is pushing ahead to deliver the launch of Wales\u2019 first satellite in 2023, and the world\u2019s first return of a satellite platform in 2024, Western added.<\/p>\n

Western says Space Forge has confidence that all of the payload customers and Virgin Orbit will recover from this.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not unusual in this industry and Virgin Orbit has a wealth of data from their previous successful missions that have allowed them to identify the anomaly which they are now working to solve. We are confident that we will see them launch from the U.K. again as early as this year,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

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It has been quite a week for the UK space industry. What was meant to mark a new era of space launch has sadly been put on hold after Virgin Orbit\u2019s launch failure just over a week ago. The mission, \u201cStart Me Up,\u201d suffered a failure on Monday Jan. 9, and an investigation is underway […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":54004,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54179"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}