Virgin Orbit: Sir Richard Branson's rocket company lays off 85% of staff

The reality is now that economy is worse all the frivolous stuff like this is going to be cut.

Consider the neophyte Relativitiy Space. They recently had a launch of their Terran-1 non-reusable vehicle. It didn't reach orbit but succeeded in a lot of other important milestones. It has an expected payload capacity of 1250kg to LEO from what I gather.

The company plans to make a larger reusable version called the Terran-R and expects it to launch as early as next year. It will have a larger payload capacity (2,500kg) and target $12 million cost per launch.

I'm skeptical they'll achieve this next year when they haven't yet reached orbit, landing stages is a huge engineering challenge and they're doing this with a methane rocket engine, which is much more complicated than the current RP-1 (ie kerosene) engines.

Falcon 9 has an estimated launch cost of $67 million but a payload to LEO as high as ~22,000kg. Their actual cost including reuse may be significantly lower but even so that puts them at $3,000/kg compared to the (still theoretical) Terran-R's projected costs of $4,800/kg.

Now, you could say that these smaller launch vehicles may have other advantages including less lead time, higher launch velocity and to simply suit smaller payloads. As we've seen from Starlink satellite launches, a single larger rocket can launch a number of satellites at once.

Obviously you can only do that if they have very similar orbits.

Building and testing a launch vehicle is an expensive business. Blue Origin has been around for almost 23 years and still hasn't reached orbit (or delivered the ULA's BE-4 engines they promised years ago). And that's with Bezos pouring billions into it.

Starlink was created, in part (IMHO), to create the launch demand that simply doesn't otherwise exist and to prove Falcon 9 with repeated reuse. There are some Falcon 9 first stages now that I believe have completed 10 successful launches and landings.

Falcon 9 has become the 747 of space launch vehicles. The 747 created a market dominating product for decades that was hugely profitable in its last decades. It took many, many years to erode that advantage (which ultimately came from the switch from four-engine to two-engine wide body planes that was a result of massive increases in engine reliability and efficiency). I see that same kind of market advantage with the falcon 9.

So small launch vehicles seems like a tough place to establish a business. Virgin Orbit seems to be a victim of that.

Edit: hm, I guess Virgin Orbit is just a small part of Virgin Galactic.