Virgin Orbit is pausing all impending operations after announcing it is furloughing the majority of its staff in a companywide effort to cut costs and secure investor funding. The company informed its staff of the furloughs at a meeting on Wednesday, telling employees they would receive further information next week,…
A Virgin Galactic stockholder is taking the company’s execs to task, saying their penchant for covering up major failures encountered during tests of its Unity spaceplane have tanked investors’ chances of winning big in the commercial space race.
Virgin Galactic’s carrier aircraft VMS Eve took to the California skies yesterday for an important two-and-a-half-hour flight test. It’s the latest sign that the Richard Branson-founded company is preparing to resume suborbital flights.
Lunar Flashlight’s journey to discover water ice on the Moon hasn’t been easy. NASA had to re-evaluate its original orbital plan on account of the probe encountering thruster performance issues and is now planning to move it to a high Earth orbit, from where the probe will only be able to scan the Moon once a month.
Last month, Virgin Orbit ran into trouble when its LauncherOne rocket crashed, destroying seven payloads on board in an attempt to deploy satellites in low Earth orbit. Now, the company suspects that the cause of the anomaly could have been a pesky filter that only cost around $100.
Virgin Investments Limited has pumped $55 million into Virgin Orbit since November of last year, in what is a troubling sign for the fledgling satellite launch company.
