Farewell, Virgin Orbit. You were pretty damn cool, and the UK both tugging you into launching from there, and then keeping you on the pavement for most of a year because they weren't actually ready for it on a permitting side is a lot for anyone to bear.
Rocket companies only make money when they're flying payloads, not sitting on pavement, so it completely wrecked their cash reserves, they couldn't weather the subsequent failure, and Branson couldn't be fucked to prop the company with his name on it up even as they did everything right and did everything they could to recover.
My official, first-party Virgin Orbit shirts and pins i got from an acquaintance who had access to their employees-only company store are more vintage and hipster and collectible now, I guess, at least.
Rocketlab getting their factory makes sense, it's like two blocks away from their own existing plant in Long Beach, the plane going to Stratolaunch makes sense, i don't know the deal with Vast except they're a new company run by a crypto weirdo.
They had another rocket ready to fly, to hit the ground running, but. Such is life. They're just the most surprising death so far in the market crash.
It looks like the half a dozen LauncherOne rockets they had in production, and the IP for LauncherOne/most of VO's IP in general, haven't been sold yet, so who knows what's gonna come of that
museum fodder, spare parts, who knows