Virgin Orbit was a company within the Virgin Group that provided launch services for small satellites. The company was formed in 2017 as a spin-off of Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic space tourism venture to develop and market the LauncherOne rocket, which had previously been a project under Virgin Galactic. LauncherOne was a two-stage launch vehicle, air-launched from a Boeing 747 carrier aircraft, designed to deliver 300 kg of payload to low Earth orbit.