Virgin Orbit plans to explore Mars by sending CubeSats

Virgin Orbit plans to deploy CubeSats towards Mars. Right now, the company is the first to propose to pull something of this scale. And to make that happen, Virgin Orbit has partnered up with SatRevolution, a Polish satellite company and a bunch of Polish universities. The plans indicate the launch of CubeSats as early as 2022.

Inspired by the attempts of NASA’s InSight mission, which successfully sent 2 CubeSats to Mars, Virgin Orbit is a corporate spin-off hailing from the company known as Virgin, yep, Richard Branson’s company.

The company said on its Twitter account, “The potential for small satellites stretches far beyond LEO – and whoever said Virgin’s orbit was limited to the Earth? We’re above and beyond excited to announce our first mission to the Red Planet.”

The company does not limit itself while making future goals, that for sure as the Vice-President of special projects at Virgin Orbit told The Verge “We spent some time internally looking at what the options are, and sort of discovered that we actually think we can do some things that are fairly interesting to places like the Moon and Mars, and the moons of Mars, and Venus, and maybe a couple of the asteroids in the asteroid belt.”

The company still has to test the LauncherOne rocket in a final first flight. The 70-foot-long rocket will be launched by “Cosmic Girl” (relax superheroes ain’t real), a Boeing 747 carrier.

Pomerantz, regarding the scope for the project, said, “This is really all about opening the aperture for what people can imagine they can do with a smaller vehicle — smaller satellites, smaller rockets. All this stuff that people, including myself, thought was impossible just a couple years ago, are now starting to come to fruition, and people are getting more creative as they see each one of these things succeed.”