Virgin Orbit captive carry
Virgin Orbit's "Cosmic Girl" 747 aircraft, with a LauncherOne rocket attached, performs a final captive carry flight April 12 before the company's first orbital launch attempt.

Virgin Orbit announced May 20 it will make the first flight of its LauncherOne air-launched vehicle as soon as May 24, but is setting modest expectations about the probability of success.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...