'Anomaly' With LauncherOne Rocket While En Route To Orbit

LauncherOne, the rocket being blasted into space tonight, has suffered an "anomaly" the operator, Virgin Orbit has said.

The event was being livestreamed from Spaceport Cornwall and organisers had set the launch window to open at 10.16pm, but it was moved up and take off took off at approximately 10:03pm.

The converted Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 (Cosmic Girl) is carrying LauncherOne, a 21 metre long rocket with nine satellites on board.

LauncherOne will detach from the aircraft over the Atlantic roughly an hour and 90 minutes after take off, not far off the southern coast of Ireland.

After LauncherOne dropped from Cosmic Girl at approximately 11:14pm it proceed on as its understood to have meant to and than at 11:46pm Virgin Orbit tweeted:

We appear to have an anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit. We are evaluating the information.

Followed at 11:54pm by:

As we find out more, we're removing our previous tweet about reaching orbit. We'll share more info when we can.

At one stage it looked like LauncherOne had reached orbit as indicated by Virgin Orbit's Twitter posting this exact outcome, the tweet has since been deleted.

No word at this time on the faith of LauncherOne.

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