In a major set back to Richard Branson, the Virgin Orbit’s first launch of its new rocket carried in the air by a Boeing 747 has failed on May 26, Associated Press has reported. Upon failure to launch, the rocket was released over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Southern California. The inaugural launch had seemed to go well until moments after the rocket was left to fall from below the jumbo jet’s left wing- commonly called Cosmic Girl. The company has notified on its Twitter timeline that all its team members working on the project are safe and were returning to the base.

Virgin Orbit is yet to clarify the reasons that led to the failure of the rocket launch. However, its Twitter timeline has listed out some details of the mission in a thread. The company has said that launcher maintained stability after release and subsequently the team working on the mission ignited the first stage engine–NewtonThree. Virgin has said in its twitter thread that a possible abnormality occurred in the first stage flight and the company will learn more about the project failure after its engineers complete the collection of ‘mountain of data.’

Virgin Orbit declared on its Twitter timeline that a team is already working extensively on the data obtained from the first unsuccessful attempt to launch the rocket. The company also expressed hope that it gets back to the second attempt to launch the rocket as soon as possible.

Virgin Orbit found some optimistic suggestions from Elon Musk- the founder of SpaceX. Musk expressed his sorrows on hearing the failure of the project in his reply to Virgin orbit’s tweet. He also said that mission to launch Orbit is hard and that SpaceX also took as many as four attempts with Falcon1.