Yesterday, newly public Virgin Orbit (NASDAQ:VORB) held a pre-flight press briefing for its upcoming Above the Clouds mission. Virgin’s LauncherOne rocket and Cosmic Girl will take off from Mojave Air and Space Port in California, and follow a flight path approximated in the graphic above.
Manifest: Four Pentagon R&D satellites, a NASA-sponsored university payload, two nanosatellites for Polish startup SatRevolution, and Adler-1, a last-minute add from Spire (NYSE:SPIR).
Timing: The launch was initially targeted for today. Virgin has pushed back the launch window to Thursday, between 4 and 6:30pm ET. “We’re taking a little extra time to thoroughly validate the system and to check our sensor readings,” Virgin tweeted.
Other updates: The air launcher has five rockets in production. All 2022 missions will take off from Mojave or Cornwall, which is in the UK.
And…the market: $VORB traded up ~31% yesterday. We’ll be interested to track how sensitive the stock price is to specific launches, delays, and production updates.
