Virgin Orbit’s ignominious journey into bankruptcy could have been prevented with better leadership, Fortune reported. In a letter sent to staff, senior executive Tony Gingiss appeared to lay the blame for its collapse firmly at the feet of chief executive Dan Hart and company directors for initiating the selloff of Virgin Orbit’s assets rather than finding a better solution. “I was not able to convince our leader and board to take a different path to give us more time to figure things out,” the COO wrote. “We ended up where we are despite my best efforts to affect our path forward.” The 2017 startup founded by British billionaire Richard Branson has opted to liquidate itself as part of a chapter 11 filing, rather than reorganize under protection from creditors like many other corporations. Whether Virgin Orbit could have survived will now never be known, but it did take an approach unique from rival Elon Musk’s SpaceX that sought to address a bottleneck in launching satellites from the ground. Under the motto “Any time, any place, any orbit,” it used a 14-year-old jumbo jet acquired from Branson’s commercial carrier Virgin Atlantic as an airborne launch platform, firing rockets slung under her wing to deliver small satellites into orbit. This would reduce the reliance on spaceports often situated in remote locations as close to the equator as possible, opening up the possibility for economically viable launches in northern countries like the U.K. (Subscription required to view article.)
