What’s longer than a football field, heavier than a blue whale and powered by six Boeing 747 engines? The Stratolaunch, a rocket-launching airplane that left its hangar and taxied down the runway for a test this weekend. The Stratolaunch is designed to carry space rockets to high altitude, where they’re then launched into orbit. The company behind the aircraft, founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, says such airborne rocket launches “significantly reduce the risk of costly delays or cancellations.” It's first scheduled flight is in early 2019. Based on a development plan laid out this spring, future rounds of taxi tests should reach on-the-ground speeds of roughly 100 mph, and then 140 mph. A speed of 140 mph, or 120 knots, is roughly what it’ll take for takeoff of the twin-fuselage plane, which has a record-setting wingspan of 385 feet.
The plane was built for Stratolaunch by Mojave-based Scaled Composites, the same company that built the carbon-composite SpaceShipOne rocket plane and its White Knight carrier airplane more than 15 years ago for the Allen-backed effort that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight. Stratolaunch’s air-launch system is a dramatically scaled-up version of SpaceShipOne, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, and Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne system. The massive airplane — which has been nicknamed Roc after a mythical giant bird — is designed to drop and launch rockets from an altitude of 30,000 feet. Such a system basically gives the rockets a head start on their path to orbit, and also makes it possible to launch payloads into any orbital inclination from any location within range of a suitably large runway. If the weather isn’t acceptable for launch at one location, Roc theoretically could fly to a more suitable location.
Credits:
http://time.com/4800318/stratolaunch/
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