Bangs, and other unintelligible noises

This week: the true meaning of the Virgin Orbit failure; and some notes on talking animals.

There are times, in this line of work, when the symbolism is just so perfect you wonder whether it counts as cheating to use it. There are times, too, when you go with the meta drop intro under the mistaken impression that this counts as an excuse.

On Monday night, Virgin Orbit – a part of a distinctively British conglomerate, founded by a distinctively British billionaire who, even with supervillain levels of wealth, still somehow manages to look like your embarrassing uncle – attempted to launch some satellites into space. To highlight the possibilities of the UK space industry, its chosen launch site was not the Florida coast or Kazakh desert generally favoured for such activities, but good old British soil: “Spaceport Cornwall”, a place whose name would be an unconvincing label for something so scifi, even if it wasn’t just a rebranded Newquay Airport, which it is. (Honestly, as I’ve argued before, you can’t just attach British names to things and expect them to sound credible, you just end up sounding like Garth Marenghi.)

Before the bad thing happened. Image: Spaceport Cornwall.

Anyway, it all went wrong. A customised Boeing 747 called Cosmic Girl – honestly, the names just keep coming in this story, don’t they? – took off and successfully released a rocket, LauncherOne, which was carrying nine satellites, somewhere off the southern coast of Ireland. LauncherOne ignited its engines, reached hypersonic speeds and made it to space. But, according to a statement from Virgin, “at some point during the firing of the rocket’s second stage engine and with the rocket travelling at a speed of more than 11,000mph, the system experienced an anomaly, ending the mission prematurely”, which is as great a euphemism for something going horribly wrong as you’re likely to come across.

In some ways, the pointing and laughing that’s greeted all this is terribly unfair. Virgin Orbit’s previous private launches have all gone fine; that this one did not seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the fact it took off from an English seaside town rather than a more impressive-sounding place. This (I’m sorry) LinkedIn post from a trade adviser by the name of Tansy Kelly Robson makes a surprisingly convincing argument that, actually, this whole thing is a good thing for the UK space industry, even though it didn’t, y’know, work. (Short version: horizontal take-offs involving planes make getting to space far cheaper; tech is dependent on iterative processes, so failures are educational.)

Despite all that, though, it’s hard not to see it as a metaphor because – between the customised Boeing 747 taking off and the, presumably quite upsetting, anomaly kicking in and ruining the fun – the science minister George Freeman said the following: “This genuinely is a historic moment in Britain. We’ve won the space race in Europe.”

This is what the government has done to this country. We stick flags on things, sneer at our friends and allies, and prematurely praise our own achievements. And then, before we’ve even finished slapping ourselves on the back, everyone is laughing at us, because everything just went wrong.

Link me baby one more time

Please forgive the relative lack of politics in the opening section this week. I’m trying to be a bit less predictable with the format, but also, if I’m honest, I’m just running out of ways to say “Christ Rishi Sunak’s rubbish at this, isn’t he?” even though he is, and I didn’t want to write about strikes again, even though they’re important. I’m sure, given the state of things, I will be coming back to both of those topics soon enough. Anyway, the links!