Reply To: Possible visibility of Virgin Orbit launch from the UK on January 9th

Forums General Discussion Possible visibility of Virgin Orbit launch from the UK on January 9th Reply To: Possible visibility of Virgin Orbit launch from the UK on January 9th

#615072
Nick James
Participant

There is a video from a fireball camera in Lanzarote which shows a bright and slow fireball northwest of the Canaries at 23:18:50.

https://twitter.com/RedSpmn/status/1612727698048311297

Drop time was 23:09 so this is around 600s downrange. Virgin Orbit stated that the vehicle reached 4.9 km/s which is a long way short of orbital velocity but fast enough to ablate on re-entry so this is consistent with re-entry of the second stage and payload.

If anyone else has contacts in the Canaries please ask if they saw anything.

As Grant says, putting stuff in orbit is still hard. Falcon 9 makes it look easy but Space-X has had a lot of practice.