Posted on 04/13/2019 8:58:19 AM PDT by BenLurkin
[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 feet long....
The jet, carrying a rocket loaded with a satellite, will take off from Mojave and climb to an altitude of 35,000 feet. There, pilots will launch the rocket from the plane on a trajectory toward space. The plane then will land safety back at Mojave, while the rocket carries the satellite into an orbit ranging from about 300 miles to 1,200 miles above Earth. The rocket deploys the satellite before eventually falling back to Earth, burning up in the sky like a meteor.
Putting small satellites into space via airplanes...eliminates the need for launch pads and all the pricey equipment and infrastructure surrounding a traditional rocket launch... the plane burns less fuel than a traditional rocket when it blasts off from Earth.
Bad weather won't be as much of a problem. Storms can delay a traditional rocket launch, but a jet could simply take off and fly over bad weather -- or around it -- and then launch the satellite.
Launches could take place more frequently and within a faster time frame. No more waiting in line for a slot to open up on a spacecraft blasting off from a traditional terrestrial launch pad.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Read the article!
In a related story the heaviest air flight on record occurred the very same day as Rosie O’Donnel and Michael Moore traveled together from New York to Los Angeles. Shattering the previous record set, by New York congressman Gerald Nadler, a decade earlier.
Is it flown by Jaeger pilots?
“I think it wouldn’t be bad to go back to nothing in space.”
You are joking, right?
I suspect it has been trumped by SpaceX with their reusable rockets.
The launch from an airplane concept puts serious design constraints on the rocket, and it looks like the rockets more or less have to be expendable.
The gains are a little bit of velocity and altitude at launch and a lot of flexibility in exactly where the launch starts.
All in all though, it is good to see real competition in the space launch industry.
I think it’s just symmetry and cost saving. They built two identical fuselages. They were able to copy the plans, the jigs, the finite-element analysis, etc. There’s only one functional cockpit, one set of controls, one pilot.
I wonder if there is a full set of flight controls in both cockpits.
Good one!
I read the article, I don’t like how much technology is up there. I get that it’s for us and to make our lives easier, or for national defense. It can also be used against us.
For the most part, technology is neither good nor bad. People are either good or bad.
For comparison, the Spruce Goose was Length: 218 ft 8 in and Wingspan: 320 ft 11 in.
Very impressive engineering...
250 tons breaking the force of gravity...
Can’t wait for Chinese to steal the design...
I am trying to understand just where the satellite will be launched from. Hanging from the center between the two fuselages?
Granting that the article is by CNN, I read it to mean that each cockpit has a set of controls, but only one is in command during a flight.
How old are you?
Do you use a cell phone? Ever use GPS..? Have you ever relied on a weather forecast..? I won't ask if you use the internet, because I SEE that you do.
How many times have you heard, "We cancelled the countdown, owing to bad weather."...?
They FLY to good weather, then launch.
This is totally fantastic; I hope they can combine it with Musk's re-landing system.
;-)
You do not really gain that much velocity from a airplane launch.
LEO requires about 17,000 mph. At best, that airplane is going 500 mph when it releases the rocket. Now you can also take advantage of the earth's rotation and prevailing winds to get higher speed, but you only get 5-6% of the required velocity.
Altitude of a LEO orbit is a minimum of 100 miles. IF the airplane is at 50,000 ft altitude (very generous assumption) that is less than 10 miles altitude.
The downsides are that the rocket is expendable, and more importantly, the rocket has to be able to take the side forces of takeoff, turbulence and potentially landing ( I think they have to be able to scrub a mission after take off and return to the hanger without launching if it is going to be commercially viable). This means greater strength and therefore greater mass for the rocket, partially negating the velocity and altitude advantages.
One of our younger relatives is an engineer and suggested that we watch Strange Angels on CBS.
“Jack Parsons, a brilliant and ambitious blue-collar worker of 1930s Los Angeles, started as a janitor at a chemical factory but had fantastical dreams that led him to birth the unknown discipline of American rocketry.”
Supposedly, this is how our rocket science was created in spite of the elite engineers at Cal Tech saying we could never launch anything to escape the earth’s gravity.
I am hooked for at least a few more shows.
Yeah, hanging underwing along the craft’s centerline is my understanding. I imagine it launches payloads in the same way that Branson’s Virgin Galactic launches its rocket-capsule.
OK, I didn't want to click on CNN, but I read an article somewhere else that said that one side was basically just a shell for carrying more fuel tank capacity, and didn't have anything behind the cockpit windows.
According to the Wikipedia page on Stratolaunch:
The pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer will be in the right fuselage cockpit, while the left fuselage one is empty and unpressurized. The flight data systems are in the left fuselage.
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