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First Mate: LauncherOne Rocket and Cosmic Girl 747

By Marc Boucher
NASA Watch
October 26, 2018
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First Mate: LauncherOne Rocket and Cosmic Girl 747

First Mate: Virgin Takes Step Forward with First Mating of LauncherOne Rocket and Cosmic Girl 747, Virgin Orbit
Today at Long Beach Airport stands a 747 aircraft with a rocket under its wing. For the first time ever, Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket has been integrated with its carrier aircraft, marking a major milestone on the path to the innovative small satellite launch service’s first space shot. The successful operation capped off a banner day of firsts on Wednesday for the company at its Long Beach, Calif. base.
Marc’s note: As NASA has a contract with Virgin Orbit this is good news. There soon should be another option to launch small satellites.

SpaceRef co-founder, entrepreneur, writer, podcaster, nature lover and deep thinker.

10 responses to “First Mate: LauncherOne Rocket and Cosmic Girl 747”

  1. ThomasLMatula says:
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    I notice they modified the hard point on the wing used to transport extra engines. Any info available on how the price of Launcher One will compare to Pegasus? I would hope it’s a lot cheaper to buy a launch on it.

    • Steve Pemberton says:
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      They installed a new underwing pylon back in August, followed by a series of flight tests with the new pylon. They will now have to do a series of flight tests with the rocket attached, followed by an unpowered drop test prior to the first actual test launch. So still a lot to do, but they are making slow but steady progress.

      I was a little surprised by the comment by Dan Hart “The fact that we shipped a rocket on this route, positioned it under the aircraft, integrated the system, and verified that that it all works together for the first time all within a single day still astounds me. In the traditional aerospace world, doing all of that would have taken weeks.”

      Maybe that is true, but it’s in contrast to how they have usually operated. For example on June 27th even before the pylon had been installed their VP of business development stated that the pylon would be installed in a few days and the first captive carry test of LauncherOne would take place “in probably a little over a week”. Whether he had been told that or was just making things up, in reality the pylon wasn’t installed installed until August, and the test rocket wasn’t mated until a few days ago. There will presumably be taxi tests before they do the first captive carry, which means November.

      Maybe things just went uncharacteristically smooth with the mating Wednesday and Dan Hart is bragging about it, which is fine. I just hope that they aren’t getting launch fever and trying to speed things up faster than they can handle.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        It probably helped that the B747 was already designed to have a pylon attached to that hard point to carry a spare engine. And since this was intended for use by B747 in commercial service I would imagine it was designed by Boeing to allow rapid installation as well as detachment. The only difference would be inclusion of the control for releasing the rocket. I wonder what the weight difference is between the rocket and the jet engines it was designed for.

        https://www.businessinsider

        Qantas strapped a 5th engine onto the wing of a Boeing 747 — here’s why

        • Steve Pemberton says:
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          Not all 747’s came with the engine ferry attachment points, that was a customer option, most 747’s didn’t have it. When an airline did use it they would attach struts to the attachment points under the wing, the struts included a chain winch which was used to haul the spare engine up where it would then be bolted to the struts. Odds are Cosmic Girl did not have the engine ferry attachment points when Virgin Atlantic purchased it in 2001, but even if it did, and even though Virgin Orbit attached the LauncherOne pylon in the same location where spare engines were attached on aircraft so equipped, I doubt if Virgin Orbit would have used the existing attachment mounts since they were designed for a much lighter and differently shaped load. Rolls-Royce engines are about 12,000 to 14,000 pounds. LauncherOne about 57,000 pounds. And apparently the new mount is designed for rockets up to 85,000 pounds. VO had to add structural reinforcement to the left wing to carry that amount of weight, so I would think while doing that they would have also installed heavier duty attachment points for the pylon at the most suitable locations for it. The pylon, which I assume is permanently or semi-permanently attached to Cosmic Girl, has its own attachments for carrying and deploying LauncherOne.

          And installing the pylon was just the first step. The needed aerodynamic testing is quite extensive, they can’t rely on the previous data from carrying spare engines. To give an idea how even small external changes affect aerodynamics, even those foldout wingtip landing lights that some planes use have a noticeable affect on how a plane flies. The old MD-80 had a quirk that the wingtip landing lights were deployed with one switch and turned on with another. Pilots sometimes used this feature creatively by deploying the landing lights without turning them on to reduce speed during descent if they didn’t want to use the speed brakes.

          Of course landing lights are symmetrical, unlike LauncherOne which affects the aerodynamics on only one side of the plane, making things a lot more complicated. And obviously due to its size it has a much greater affect on flying characteristics, even on a heavy plane like the 747. Thus several weeks of flight testing were needed even with just the empty rocket mount (which is how the 747 will return home on nominal missions), and now several weeks of flight testing will be needed with LauncherOne attached. And the first tests will be with an empty LauncherOne. Then they will fill it with ballast and do it all over again, leading up to a drop test of the non-flying test article. They have to test all types of flight profiles and conditions, not only to make sure that there aren’t any unexpected flight characteristics for the 747, but also so that they can later provide the operational pilots with customized procedures including modified takeoff speed, climb angles, stall speed etc.

    • fcrary says:
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      A Pegasus is going to be $40 million (2017 GAO report) to $56 million (what NASA is paying for the ICON launch.) I think there are some costs associated with payload integration that differ from one launch contract to another. That’s to get 450 kg to a 500-km Sun synchronous orbit. Virgin’s LauncherOne is advertised at $10 to $12 million for 300 kg to a similar orbit, but it hasn’t flown yet. Rocket Lab’s Electron (one successful test flight) is ~200 kg for $6 million.

      The above mentioned GAO report, by the way, was on using retired ballistic missiles as launch vehicles. It’s barely a year old and already obsolescent; the cost of small launch vehicles and the existence of more than one such vehicle undermine the report’s assumptions.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        I am not surprised that the payload is less. The hard point they used for the pylon was designed to carry spare engines and so it’s understandable it’s weight limit would be less than the center line mount for the Pegasus on the L-1011. Also, since it is on the wing and not on the center line, there would be issues related to the distribution of weight that would also limit the size of the launch.

        • Steve Pemberton says:
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          Not that easy to find launcher weights but I read one place that LauncherOne is about 57,000 pounds which I think is more than Pegasus.

          But yes side mounting instead of center mounting will have some effect on how much weight can be carried, although I don’t know how much. And in theory it allows for larger diameter rockets than mounting under the belly. And it’s located pretty close to the fuselage which reduces the balance effects somewhat. And those can be mitigated somewhat with fuel distribution. On the B-52 rocketplane launches, from what I read they would shift fuel to the left wing roughly equal to the weight of the rocketplane to balance things out. Just prior to the drop they would shift half of that fuel to the right wing (the same side as the rocketplane), thus creating an overbalance on the right side equal to about half the weight of the rocketplane. After the drop this immediately created an overbalance on the left side equal to half the weight of the rocketplane. Then they moved the fuel back to center to get things balanced again for the ride home.

          Of course this somewhat affects how much fuel can be carried, which could have an impact on launcher weight depending on how far from the deployment site they need to fly.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            Yes, 57,000 lbs seems heavy given it’s not able to match the payload on the Pegasus, which is only 40,000 lbs. I was thinking a weight of 27,000 would be more reasonable given the use of composites in it.

          • fcrary says:
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            The two rockets are pretty different. LauncherOne is a two stage, liquid fueled rocket. Pegasus is a three stage, solid rocket with an optional fourth, monoprop fourth stage. Those differences could add up to a factor of two, and I wouldn’t even want to guess in which direction without knowing more details.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            Yes. It appears the reason they went to the B747 was because Launcher One became two large for White Knight Two which had a payload limit of 37,000 lbs. The Pegasus is listed at 40,000 lbs while the Pegasus XL is listed with a weight of around 51,000 bs. By comparison the X-15 weighted only 34,000 lbs. So Launcher One is by all appearances a very heavy rocket.

            But it won’t be the heaviest rocket air-launched. That record is still held by the USAF which launch a Minuteman Missile (about 78,000 lbs) from a C-5 on October 24, 1974. That is still the record for air launch.

            That said, Launcher One will be by far the heaviest rocket ever launched from the wing of an aircraft and it will be interesting to watch them do it. Virgin Galactic might have been better off just rebuilding one of the C-133’s from Mojave for air launch of Launcher One by dropping it out the cargo bay doors, as was done with the C-5/Minuteman launch.

            But a C-133 doesn’t look as cool as a B747 launching a rocket. I could also see military applications of the B747 launch technology as a way to make ballistic missiles more mobile and harder to destroy in a nuclear exchange. I imagine the USAF will be watching the success of Launcher One.