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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

I'm really thrilled to see renewed interest in space, and I hope that we will end up with moon bases and Mars colonies in the near future... Now, the challenge is not to end up with corporate hegemony.

Reminds me of that infamous Fight Club quote:

> When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks. [0]

That aside, does Virgin Orbit have anything to do with Virgin Galactic? I vaguely remember Chamath talking about Virgin Galactic's commercial market opportunities when shilling his SPAC, but nothing directly about Virgin Orbit.

[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Va2K__8rV3o

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Based on the wikipedia page it looks like Virgin Orbit is it's own separate private company held by the Virgin Group. It was spun off of Galactic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Orbit

> Now Virgin Galactic officials have decided to break off the satellite launcher program and make it its own company. Called Virgin Orbit, the California-based firm is seeking to enter a market that has attracted a lot of interest in recent years as satellites, once huge and expensive, have shrunk in size and cost.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/02...

Hmm, interesting. I wonder why they spun it off — doesn't seem to make sense from Galactic's POV. Leadership dispute?

Galactic's mission is essentially unrelated to space, beyond providing a short peek at it. Sending a plane up to the edge of space for a brief period with passengers aboard barely overlaps what's needed to put anything in orbit. It makes sense that they'd be different companies.

Not to mention Virgin Orbit actually doing something useful after lot less time and likely money invested.

Virgin Galactic has been working on their sub-orbital rocketplane since 2004 and they have yet to fly any paying customers. For something that should have been "just like Space Ship One but bigger" it has been taking ages and might not make much sense if they ever get it working (eq. you might as well buy a seat on a proper commercial Dragon orbital flight).

Yeah. I've always been a big Virgin Galactic skeptic. It seemed like a sort of a stunt from the beginning. "Dangerous joyrides which briefly reach the edge of space" might appeal to some people, but is otherwise a spectacularly useless and ridiculously expensive activity.

It mainly seems to be a sort of playground for (originally) Bert Rutan to inadvertently prove that his ideas about planes and low-tech systems don't really translate to this sort of application. Nice work if you can get it, maybe.

Thank you for attending my TED rant.

They’re separate entities with very different missions.

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