Soooo we made orbit yesterday and I have some feelings... 1/

When I joined VG almost 9 years ago (woof) as an intern on the SpaceShipTwo program the very first meeting my manager brought me to was a concept design review for a smallsat launcher upper stage engine. At that point, LauncherOne hadn't even been publicly announced yet. 2/

My first exposure to the program was that meeting where I watched a design engineer not much older than I argue back and forth about fluid dynamics in a rocket injector with a technical advisor from NASA who had decades of propulsion experience. 3/

Challenging conventional approaches to propulsion and space launch was exactly what I wanted to do in my career. I was hooked from day one. 4/

When I started with L1 the entirety of the launch vehicle team was a handful of propulsion engineers (since engines tend to take the longest to develop), one person doing structures, one person doing avionics, and a program lead. Everyone could fit in one room. 5/

Everyone did everything. From building a test site from an empty slab in the desert to picking up parts at local machine shops. Lots of learning during this time. (Pro-tip: Just because someone can design a rocket engine doesn't mean they're qualified to paint a test stand...) 6/

A ton of changes happened over the next few years. The rocket got bigger and changed from pressure-fed to pump-fed, we moved from dropping off WhiteKnightTwo to our own dedicated 747, we spun off from Virgin Galactic and became Virgin Orbit, and we moved to Long Beach. 7/

I still remember the day I realized we weren't a tiny launch startup anymore. I was assembling my desk in our largely empty new building in Long Beach and a facilities team member walked up to me and said "Hey you know we have people who can do that now, right?” 8/

VO has grown and matured a lot over the last few years especially. Subsystem development is hard but thorough system integration and qualification is *so* much harder. 9/

Our 1st Demo Launch last May didn't get as far as we would have hoped but watching L1 follow through a pitch perfect pull up after engine start was incredible to see. You just can't test that kind of thing before you actually do it. And Flight 1 proved we could. 10/

Now with Flight 2 we've finished the job. Made orbit. Launched satellites. I have so much gratitude towards all my teammates, past and present, who have worked so hard for so many years to make yesterday’s result a reality. 11/

On to the next one.

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