Doesn’t seem practical for much. Bragging rights?
American greatness.
Read the article, still not great.
I think it wouldn’t be bad to go back to nothing in space.
Ah Scaled Composites now owned by Northrup Grumman, and I wonder if “the wizard of weird” aka Burt Rutan penned the concept or even more before he retired....
Hard to imagine the strength of the main spar between the two fuselages.
Geez I hope that works. It seems like a design nightmare.
Two separate cockpits? Two sets of flight controls? Look at the landing-gear trucks! Can you imagine taxiing that beast?
Guess they didn’t get the memo that airplanes were to be eliminated in 12 years because, cow farts.
Meh.
Still waiting (since the 60’s!) for my Flying Car that Popular Mechanics said I would have by now! ;)
Are the noses really that blunt? Otherwise, the front ends remind me of B1s.
The central wing must be tremendously strong. I would have expected the twin tails to be joined. But if it’s launching rockets, I suppose there’s always the chance of the payload passing between them.
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 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 wonder if there is a full set of flight controls in both cockpits.
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?
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.
35,000 feet?
Umm, why spend money on a plane that does what other planes can do?
Another article, same topic: https://www.theverge.com/transportation/2019/4/13/18309129/stratolaunch-worlds-biggest-airplane-first-flight-rockets