Virgin Orbit Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:VORB) has said its next rocket launch will be from California but that it is in talks with UK authorities about another attempt from Spaceport Cornwall after the failure to complete its orbital launch earlier this week.
The LauncherOne rocket for its next mission is going through final checks, the company said in a statement on Thursday, after its failed mission on Monday night.
It said it is “in active discussions with key government and commercial stakeholders in the UK to start planning mission opportunities for as soon as later this year.”
Shares in Virgin Orbit, having risen ahead of the launch, plunged back to earth fast on Tuesday after an “anomaly” was blamed as its Cosmic Girl converted jumbo jet safely completed takeoff from Cornwall and LauncherOne reached space but then failed to carry its commercial payloads into orbit.
The company today said the anomaly in the upper stage of the rocket occurred at an altitude of roughly 180 kolimetres.
“This anomaly prematurely ended the first burn of the upper stage,” the company noted, without sharing any extra details on what went wrong.
Based on the company's experience and the telemetry data from the flight, chief executive Dan Hart said: “I am confident that root cause and corrective actions will be determined in an efficient and timely manner.”
Analysts at Canaccord Genuity earlier halved their price target for Virgin Orbit but kept a 'buy' rating on the shares, saying they expect that the anomaly investigation could delay a return to flight until the third quarter, based on the experiences of SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Astra and other launch providers and LauncherOne’s stage of development.
The engineering team will need to examine the flight data to conduct a root-cause analysis before resuming launch operations, the analysts said.
While a slowdown in Virgin Orbit’s launch cadence may not impact the rate of new rocket production at its facility in Long Beach, California, the analysts said it may require technical fixes to be applied to manufactured rockets in inventory after determining the root cause of this week’s anomaly.
It was highlighted that both Elon Musk's SpaceX and Rocket Lab experienced multiple launch failures, but after conducting enough flights, spacecraft/flight engineers can work through most of the kinks that can arise with a particular system.
“This results in highly reliable systems like Falcon 9, Electron and Atlas V over time,” the Canaccord analysts said. “We believe that VORB is approaching this level of competency with LauncherOne, and the single-engine-per-stage simplicity of the vehicle makes it significantly easier to determine the source of a malfunction than more complex vehicles.”