Cosmic Girl, Virgin Orbit’s space launch plane, touches down in Southern California – The Mercury News

Cosmic Girl, Virgin Orbits specially modified jumbo jet designed to serve as a flying launchpad, touched down Monday afternoon at Long Beach Airport to the delight of those working to help the company join the United States nascent private spaceflight industry.

Were here to redefine the word launchsite. And were here to celebrate that, Virgin Orbit President Dan Hart said after Cosmic Girl had taxied from a Long Beach Airport runway to an audience of Virgin Orbit employees and Long Beach dignitaries.

Cosmic Girl is a Boeing 747-400 jet that, in Harts words, had the perfect name for its new mission. The aircraft already had its moniker while flying passengers in the service of Virgin Atlantic.

Virgin Galactic, the part of the Virgin Group thats focused on eventually letting customers buy a ticket to travel into outer space, acquired Cosmic Girl in late 2015. Virgin Orbit was part of Virgin Galactic before acquiring its own name in March.

Virgin Orbits headquarters is in the Douglas Park area of northeast Long Beach, and Cosmic Girl is a major part of that companys effort to develop a relatively inexpensive method of shooting satellites into orbit. The companys plan is for Cosmic Girl to carry a rocket, dubbed LauncherOne, under its left wing in order to be fired into space while the aircraft is in flight.

Monday signified the first time Cosmic Girl made an appearance in the companys home city.

Virgin Orbit chief engineer Kevin Sagis has been working on Virgin projects leading up to Cosmic Girls modifications for about five years, he said. He was one of the projects first five team members, and said the project subsequently involved the work of some 300 people in laboring over the course of three years.

LauncherOne is still in development. The two-stage rocket is designed to be nearly 70 feet long and to weigh about 55,000 pounds when carrying a full load of fuel and its payload. A launch could cost customers $10 million to $12 million.

For comparison, Hawthornes Space Exploration Technologies, Inc., advertises a $62 million price for a launch on board its Falcon 9 rocket. Virgin Orbits plan is to serve customers using smaller satellites at lower orbits than SpaceXs clients.

About 80 percent of Cosmic Girls upgrades involved mechanical changes enabling the jet to carry LauncherOne, Sagis said. The remainder of the work involved changes to its electrical and fuel systems.

Sagis is hopeful the Cosmic Girl and LauncherOne technologies will lead to applications that improve the lives of human beings on earth. He said he looks forward to companies being able to hire Virgin Orbit to launch satellites that may improve communications networks or weather forecasting.

The reason I came here is I got the opportunity to come in on the ground floor of a very exciting project, he said.

LauncherOne is not yet operational and was not on display Monday afternoon. Hart said in an interview that he expects LauncherOne to be ready for missions by early 2018.

Although Virgin Orbit has not announced a possible date for LauncherOnes first mission, the company has already disclosed a few prospective customers before getting its own name.

In June 2015, Virgin Galactic announced plans for 39 satellite launches for OneWeb, a venture that has declared plans to deploy a constellation of communications satellites in an attempt to make high-speed Internet services available to areas on the planet where online access is presently difficult. Virgin Group founder Richard Branson is a member of OneWebs board of directors.

Another announcement in October 2015 told of a $4.7 million agreement with NASA for a test launch involving multiple satellites. Virgin Galactic reported in September of last year that Australian communications firm Sky and Space Global had contracted for a quartet of LauncherOne missions.

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Cosmic Girl, Virgin Orbit's space launch plane, touches down in Southern California - The Mercury News