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Stratolaunch, the giant aircraft designed to lift rockets into the stratosphere for drop-and-launch has been rolled out for the first time.
The initial construction on the massive plane Paul Allen has been quietly building in the California desert is complete, and the vehicle, which would be the world's largest plane with a wingspan wider than Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose, was wheeled out of its hangar for the first time on Wednesday.
[...] But why is Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft and owner of the Seattle Seahawks, building such a massive plane? It's not to carry passengers, but rather rockets. The bigger the plane, the larger the rockets, or the greater the number.
Allen's Stratolaunch company has partnered with Orbital ATK to "air launch" the company's Pegasus XL, a rocket capable of delivering small satellites, weighing as much as 1000 pounds, to orbit. The rockets would be tethered to the belly of the giant plane, which would fly them aloft, and once at an altitude of 35,000 feet or so, the rockets would drop and "air launch" to space.
"With airport-style operations and quick turn-around capabilities," the company said it believes "air launch" is a cheaper and more efficient way to get satellites into space than rockets that launch vertically and can be extraordinarily expensive.
See also:
The Register
Ars Technica (pictures)
(Score: 3, Informative) by MrGuy on Friday June 02 2017, @03:56PM (1 child)
I think I'll let Randall Munroe of XKCD explain why for me, since he does a better job than I would.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/ [xkcd.com]
Key quote: "The reason it's hard to get to orbit isn't that space is high up.
It's hard to get to orbit because you have to go so fast....(snip)...But getting to space is easy. The problem is staying there."
To paraphrase, thinking "what if we started from higher up in the atmosphere/closer to space?" seems intuitively like it would make getting objects into orbit much easier, because you start from "closer up" and have to fight less of the atmosphere. But the savings turn out to be not that big in practice, because getting to space isn't about going up really far, but about going sideways really fast. The complications introduced by having to launch a rocket out of an airplane seem large, and the benefit doesn't seem nearly as massive you might intuitively think.
(Score: 2) by Bobs on Friday June 02 2017, @05:57PM
Thanks for the link - hadn't seen that.