Exclusive: How Virgin Orbit is launching rockets from a 747

The 747 was meant to be finished. But Virgin Orbit’s mind-boggling plan to fix rockets to its wing could not just give the Queen of the Skies a fitting send-off but change the space business. The company’s CEO, Dan Hart, tells Adam Thorn how he did it.

Ask Dan Hart how he caught the space bug, and he tells you much the same story as everyone else I’ve spoken to. “It might have had something to do with staying up late one summer evening and watching the first humans lay their feet on the moon.” Hart was just eight then, but that passion eventually parlayed into a monster 34-year stint at Boeing, where he worked with the US government and NASA on small satellite systems. Still, he was a company man. But one day in 2017, he took a call out of the blue from the Virgin Group, and later, Richard Branson himself, asking if he fancied blasting out of his comfort zone to helm a project that still today seems utterly preposterous.

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