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With decades of excitement generated by NASA launches, and now talk of a billionaire space race driven by some of the world’s richest men, the UK may be forgiven for feeling a little left out when it comes to the final frontier.
While the likes of Helen Sharman, who became the first Briton in space in 1989, and Tim Peake, who performed a historic spacewalk 27 years later, have flown the flag for the UK among the stars, never before has this island had its own rocket launched into space.
Until now (or, at least, pretty soon from now).
Sneaking in ahead of NASA’s delayed Artemis 1 launch, the fabulously named Cosmic Girl is due to take off from Cornwall within the next few weeks.
As the clock ticks down, here is everything you need to know as the UK gets involved in the space race.
How will the launch work?
The key thing to realise about this launch is that it’s not going to remind you of a classic NASA spectacle, with a huge spacecraft launching vertically into the atmosphere.
Cosmic Girl may be named like a knock-off Star Wars ship, but it is in fact an old Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747.
The seats were ripped out, and the upper deck was converted into a control centre for launch engineers ahead of its arrival on the southwest coast from Virgin Orbit’s factory in California.
Under its left wing is LauncherOne, a 21m (69ft) rocket which will be released at 35,000ft over the Atlantic Ocean before accelerating to 8,000mph on its mission to deploy seven satellites into orbit.
So when it comes to the view from Spaceport Cornwall, it will not look dissimilar to any other plane taking off when it jets off under the cover of night.
Cosmic Girl, operated by Virgin Orbit, has plenty of experience in that regard – in its past life it carried more than 2.5 million passengers on almost 8,300 flights.
Why are we not…
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Source : skynews
