/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15460268
previous thread had a few articles about this already (foust and sheetz)
they didn't really have opinion pieces like this article does though

> No, the problem was Virgin Orbit's management, including Chief Executive Officer Dan Hart and its founder, Sir Richard Branson. Due to their leadership, the company had a terrible, unsupportable business plan and compounded those issues by hiring an unsustainable workforce of 700 people.

> This business ran fairly lean until Virgin Orbit was separated from its parent company in 2017, and Branson hired Hart, who had spent decades as a system engineer at Boeing’s Space division as its president. Hart instituted a more cautious approach and began staffing up the company. A planned first launch in 2018 was delayed by more than two years.

> When LauncherOne finally took flight for the first time in May 2020, the company had spent a staggering amount of money, nearly $1 billion, developing the rocket and air-launch system. It was clear at the time that Virgin Orbit was never going to make that money back by charging $12 million to $15 million to launch a few hundred kilograms per mission.

holy fucking shit, SpaceX has used like 3 bil on Starship

> There clearly was no market for this, and even reaching such a cadence would have required several years. Rocket Lab, which has a proven, similarly sized vehicle in Electron, is only seeing a demand for about a dozen flights per year to dedicated orbits. SpaceX, with its Transporter rideshare missions, was also eating into Virgin Orbit's market. The business case simply did not close.