Skip to main content

Virgin Orbit successfully launches its first night mission

Virgin Orbit launched seven satellites using its LauncherOne system last night, Friday, July 1, in its first nighttime launch. While other companies like SpaceX or Rocket Lab use rockets for such launches, Virgin Orbit attaches a booster to a modified aircraft that carries it to 30,000 feet before releasing it. The booster then makes the rest of the journey into orbit and deploys its payload.

LauncherOne took off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California at 10:50 p.m. PT, with the satellites deployed at 12:55 a.m. PT on Saturday, July 2. If you’d like to watch the launch, you can see a replay of the livestream below or on Virgin Orbit’s YouTube channel:

Virgin Orbit’s Straight Up Mission

“Congratulations to our team for completing another successful mission to space today!” the company wrote on Twitter. “We deployed a total of seven customer satellites into Low Earth Orbit as planned.” This was the company’s fourth commercial mission, following its previous satellite deployment mission in January this year.

Virgin Orbit launches night mission.
Virgin Orbit

The mission on Friday was for the U.S. Space Force and deployed seven satellites from various government agencies. These payloads include the Compact Total Irradiance Monitor-Flight Demonstration (CTIM) small satellite, which will measure how much total energy is coming from the sun to Earth — a factor called “total solar irradiance.” This is important for modeling the global climate, especially in the context of climate change.

Recommended Videos

“By far the dominant energy input to Earth’s climate comes from the Sun,” said the principal investigator for the project, Dave Harber of the University of Colorado, Boulder, in a statement. “It’s a key input for predictive models forecasting how Earth’s climate might change over time.”

The CTIM system is very small — it’s a shoebox-sized satellite called a CubeSat — and it is designed to test whether such tiny satellites can provide useful scientific data even when measuring big factors like total solar irradiance. Previous instruments for measuring total solar irradiance, like the Total Irradiance Monitor (TIM) instrument on the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite, are much larger. If it’s possible to get the same quality of measurements from a smaller satellite, it will be cheaper and simpler to continue measuring this important factor into the future.

Georgina Torbet
Georgina has been the space writer at Digital Trends space writer for six years, covering human space exploration, planetary…
SpaceX just launched another mission to the moon
SpaceX launches the IM-2 mission to the moon.

SpaceX has successfully launched Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander toward the moon in the IM-2 mission. Athena is scheduled to reach the lunar surface on Thursday, March 6.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying the uncrewed lunar lander lifted off from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:16 p.m. ET on Wednesday, Febraury 26.

Read more
How to watch NASA launch its cosmic detective mission, SPHEREx
NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer), a space telescope, is situated on a work stand ahead of prelaunch operations at the Astrotech Processing Facility at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025.

Update: The launch has been moved to Thursday, March 4. NASA states, "The teams need additional time to evaluate launch vehicle hardware data." The article has been updated accordingly.

This coming week sees the launch of a new NASA astrophysics mission, SPHEREx. This space telescope will investigate the origins of the universe, looking at how everything that exists went from being a tiny dot in the milliseconds after the big bang to being trillions of times that size.

Read more
SpaceX will launch its Starship megarocket this week
The Starship launching from Starbase in October 2024.

SpaceX will launch its Starship megarocket for the eighth time on Friday, February 28.

The news came via SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, who posted a short message on X saying simply: “Starship Flight 8 flies Friday.”

Read more