Virgin Orbit to lay off 85 percent of staff, freeze operations

Re:Virgin Orbit to lay off 85 percent of staff, freeze opera... by JumpCrisscross on Friday March 31, 2023 @04:45PM (#35393382)

SpaceX’s secret sauce was mass manufacturing. Not building a rocket, but building a system that builds rockets. I remember, over a decade ago, looking at these shops and realising the specialty plane Virgin’s launch systems relied on were being built as works of art. Falcons, on the other hand, were not. Even with the company’s eye on reuse.

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Re:Virgin Orbit to lay off 85 percent of staff, freeze opera... by chrispeel on Friday March 31, 2023 @08:37PM (#35395748)

Mass manufacturing may be important, but there's also a fully reusable first stage, and then just executing. These days they're reusing things enough that I'm not sure the mass manufacturing is so important

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Re:Virgin Orbit to lay off 85 percent of staff, freeze opera... by jillesvangurp on Friday March 31, 2023 @10:23PM (#35396411)

SpaceX went through a similarly fragile stage where it nearly went bankrupt before it turned things around and managed to get the Falcon 9 going. Elon Musk got lucky with securing funding at the last minute. And of course he did take on a lot of personal financial risk at the time. Maybe the difference between Branson and Musk is how far they are willing to go.

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Re:Virgin Orbit to lay off 85 percent of staff, freeze opera... by fuzzfactor on Saturday April 01, 2023 @10:56AM (#35400787)

Maybe also a lot of difference in what kind of engineering could be a foundation before becoming a billionaire?

It is kind of a space race after all.

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Re:Virgin Orbit to lay off 85 percent of staff, freeze opera... by mlyle on Saturday April 01, 2023 @12:44AM (#35397214)

> realising the specialty plane Virgin’s launch systems relied on

Virgin Galactic which depends upon those "specialty planes" is doing fine, apparently. It's Virgin Orbit with the 747-based system to orbit that is probably at its end.

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Re:Virgin Orbit to lay off 85 percent of staff, freeze opera... by JumpCrisscross on Saturday April 01, 2023 @02:21AM (#35397672)

> Virgin Galactic which depends upon those "specialty planes" is doing fine, apparently

Mhm.

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Re:Virgin Orbit to lay off 85 percent of staff, freeze opera... by mlyle on Saturday April 01, 2023 @02:54AM (#35397870)

Well, it's been a rocky ride overall but they're not running out of cash and have a big order book.

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