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The Stratolaunch Roc plane in action during testing - Stratolaunch The world's largest flying aircraft has reached new heights, with Stratolaunch today completing the seventh test flight of its gigantic Roc carrier plane and logging a record altitude for the huge aircraft in the process. The exercise was also used to test the in-flight performance of recently installed pylon hardware, which will launch smaller hypersonic aircraft from altitude and send them across the skies at speeds of over Mach 5. California's Stratolaunch originally designed Roc to carry rockets and satellites into the stratosphere from where they would then be...

Named Roc, the twin-fuselage aircraft has a wingspan of 385 feet (117 meters). It was developed by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, who died just months before it flew for the first time in April 2019. Allen intended to use it as a carrier aircraft for space launches, carrying satellite-laden rockets beneath the center of the wing and releasing them at high altitude. The new owners initially plan to use it as a carrier aircraft for launches of reusable hypersonic flight research vehicles.

Stratolaunch's website now reveals that the company has reinvented itself as a builder, tester and operator of hypersonic vehicles — those that can travel at least five times the speed of sound, or Mach 5. The huge plane is key to this new mission, hauling vehicles aloft to test various payloads in the extreme environments imposed by hypersonic flight. Those vehicles will include Stratolaunch's Talon-A, a 28-foot-long (8.5 m), 6,000-lb. (2,722 kilograms) reusable craft capable of reaching Mach 6. The huge dual-fuselage plane — which used to be called Roc, but is now apparently known as the Stratolaunch Carrier —...

The space vehicle launch company owned by the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has confirmed that it's still operational, following a report that it was closing shop. Earlier Friday, Reuters said four sources told it that Stratolaunch Systems Corporation would be closing down. Stratolaunch has been developing a series of space launch vehicles including a super-sized aircraft. In August 2018, the company unveiled a lineup of vehicles. The Stratolaunch plane was designed to launch a Pegasus XL rocket, with the company also designing three other launch vehicles including a three-core rocket that would carry 15 times the Pegasus payload,...

[I]n the desert north of Los Angeles, a gigantic, six-engined megajet with the wingspan of an American football field flew Saturday morning for the first time. Stratolaunch Systems, the company founded in 2011 ... conducted the first test flight of the world's largest plane. Stratolaunch aircraft is a giant flying launch pad, designed to hurtle satellites into low Earth orbit. It aims to offer the military, private companies and even NASA itself a more economical way to get into space. The aircraft's wingspan measures 385 feet -- wider than any airplane on the planet. From tip to tail, it's 238...

Stratolaunch is best known for its development of a giant aircraft that will be the largest in the world by wingspan. The twin-fuselage plane, with six jet engines, has carried out a series of taxi tests at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, most recently one Jan. 9 where it reached a speed of nearly 220 kilometers per hour. In that test the plane's nose gear briefly left the ground in a "rotation authority maneuver" that suggested the plane was nearly ready for its first flight. … Stratolaunch didn't formally announce its launch vehicle development efforts until August...

For years now, the Pentagon has been in the market for new heavy-lift launch vehicles – rockets that can lift between 44,000 to 110,000 pounds. Currently, the only market options available are either too costly or too reliant on Russian-made parts.To that end, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced that he will begin devoting most of his company’s efforts on developing the “BFR” – short for Big F-ing Rocket – which will allegedly be so huge and powerful that it will make the company’s previous rocket lines outdated in just a few short years. Musk stated at the South by Southwest...

The double-bodied jet —which has the largest wingspan of any aircraft in the world —has been undergoing tests at Stratolaunch's facility at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. The latest phase in this process was testing the aircraft's steering and stopping capabilities. ... The monster jet was only rolled out from its scaffolding in May. This weekend's latest milestone comes three months after the company successfully tested the six engines on the colossal airplane for the first time. Stratolaunch officials have said they hope to have the aircraft in flight by the end of the decade, and the...

The colossal Stratolaunch carrier plane rolled out of its hangar at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, California, today (May 31) to undergo fueling tests. It's the first public look at the full craft —which is designed to launch rockets into orbit from the sky — since construction began. "We're excited to announce that Stratolaunch aircraft has reached a major milestone in its journey toward providing convenient, reliable, and routine access to low-Earth orbit," Stratolaunch Systems Corp. CEO Jean Floyd said in a statement. "This marks the completion of the initial aircraft-construction phase and the beginning of the...

Six years after Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen started up Stratolaunch Systems, the billionaire’s air-launch venture brought its humongous twin-fuselage airplane out in the open for the first time today. “Stratolaunch came out of the hangar for fuel testing,” Allen said in a tweet that featured an aerial photo of the plane. More pictures were posted to Stratolaunch’s website. Stratolaunch CEO Jean Floyd said the plane’s emergence from its hangar at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port was part of a “major milestone in its journey toward providing convenient, reliable and routine access to low Earth orbit.” The plane is...

(Mojave, Calif.-AP, Oct 4, 2004 Updated 10:54 AM) _ A stubby rocket plane was slung from the belly of a carrier plane toward space Monday in the final leg of a trip toward the edge of the Earth's atmosphere and a $10 million prize. A new pilot and potential astronaut, Brian Binnie, was chosen to fly the second flight into space in six days for SpaceShipOne, the rocket plane funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen. The carrier plane took off from a desert runway and the plane was released in midair and fired its rocket to continue on its...

Billionaire Paul Allen has formed a new company to help make spaceflight more affordable and efficient. Vulcan Aerospace, which was unveiled Monday (April 13), will spearhead the space projects of Vulcan, Inc., a company Allen and his sister Jody formed in 1986. "Vulcan Aerospace is the company within Vulcan that plans and executes projects to shift how the world conceptualizes space travel through cost reduction and on‐demand access," Vulcan Aerospace president Chuck Beames and his colleague Kyu Hwang wrote in a paper describing the company that was presented at the 31 st Space Symposium in Colorado Springs this week. "Vulcan...

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan are building the world’s biggest plane to help launch cargo and astronauts into space, in the latest of several ventures fueled by technology tycoons clamoring to write America’s next chapter in spaceflight. Their plans, unveiled Tuesday, call for a twin-fuselage aircraft with wings longer than a football field to carry a rocket high into the atmosphere and drop it, avoiding the need for a launch pad and the expense of additional rocket fuel. Allen, who teamed up with Rutan in 2004 to send the first privately financed, manned spacecraft into space,...

The first images of the Stratolaunch airplane system have emerged, courtesy of KGET in Bakersfield, and the thing is just as massive we imagined. Bringing the enormous aircraft to fruition is not a done deal, but it's a good sign that the incredible build is under way. Once finished, the behemoth plane will have a 385-foot wingspan, making it the largest aircraft ever. It's not designed as a passenger plane, though. Backer Paul Allen (he of Microsoft fame) has bigger plans in mind: space launches. The Stratolaunch will fly to a high altitude before deploying a rocket that will detach,...

New photos reveal mammoth structure of Paul Allen’s six-engine Stratolaunch Feb 24, 2015, 12:26pm PST Updated: Feb 24, 2015, 4:03pm PST   View Photos KGET image One of the Stratolaunch's twin carbon composite hulls, nearly done.   Steve Wilhelm Paul Allen's giant satellite launch plane, called Stratolaunch, has been kept mostly under wraps since the project began – or at least as much under wraps as you can keep something with a 380-foot wingspan.But now, new images from a California television station have revealed some interesting details about the aircraft.Stratolaunch is Allen's bid to compete in launching satellites into...

The tycoons of cyberspace are looking to bankroll America's resurgence in outer space, reviving "Star Trek" dreams that first interested them in science. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen made the latest step Tuesday, unveiling plans for a new commercial spaceship that, instead of blasting off a launch pad, would be carried high into the atmosphere by the widest plane ever built before it fires its rockets. He joins Silicon Valley powerhouses Elon Musk of PayPal and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com Inc. in a new private space race that attempts to fill the gap left when the U.S. government ended the space...