The company succeeded for the second time after a failed test last May.
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“LauncherOne has reached orbit! Everyone on the team who is not in the control center has gone crazy, “the company announced Twitter.
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The plane took off from an airport in the Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles, California, and launched a rocket over the Pacific Ocean. The rocket launched ten satellites of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) into orbit, Reuters reported, saying it was a key milestone in the entire program.
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Footage from orbit.
Virgin Orbit, founded by British billionaire Richard Branson in 2012, aims to provide a fast and adaptable service to launch small satellites weighing between 300 and 500 kg into orbit, a growing market.
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The 21-meter-long Virgin Orbit, nicknamed LauncherOne, does not take off vertically, but is launched into the air under the wing of a modified Boeing 747 called the Cosmic Girl.
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Once the aircraft reaches the correct altitude, it launches a rocket that starts its own engine to reach space and place its cargo into orbit. Launching a rocket from an aircraft is easier than launching vertically, because theoretically a simple runway is enough instead of an expensive space launch pad, AFP noted.
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According to Virgin Orbit, this way of launching satellites, in contrast to the vertical launch of the rocket from the ground spaceport, minimizes the risk of cancellation of the launch due to weather, Reuters reported. He added that a subsidiary of Virgin Orbital VOX Space sold three launches using the system to the United States Armed Forces for $ 35 million (about $ 760 million); the first should take place in October.
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Footage from orbit.
Richard Branson founded another space company, Virgin Galactic, whose goal is to send tourists into space to enjoy a state of weightlessness at a distance of about 80 kilometers from the earth’s surface.
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Other private companies of Blue Origin, the founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos and SpaceX, the head of Tesla Elon Musek, also set the same goal.
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Last week, Bezos’s Blue Origin company conducted another successful test of its New Shepard rocket with a module for space tourists to fly in the future. Both the rocket and the module, reusable, landed safely independently after a flight test lasting approximately ten minutes. The unmanned test, the fourteenth in a row, took place on Thursday at the company’s commercial spaceport south of El Paso, Texas.
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Blue Origin plans to undertake suborbital flights with tourists, during which the module for a six-member crew approaches or crosses the edge of space, but does not reach orbit around the Earth. The people on board are to experience a weightless state for about five minutes on this expedition. Originally, the company planned to start commercial flights with passengers in 2019, in the end this may happen this year.
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