BIG plane!!!!

[Bill Greenwood]

There is a photo on news just now of the world's largest plane. Its 385 feet wingspan, hard to believe but weight is listed at 500,000 lbs. and thats just the empty weight..Its from Paul Allen of Microsoft.
Its dual fuselages with a center wing section, sort of like a P-38 and with 6 jet engines hung on the wings outside the fuselages.
Doesnt say what purpose, if any, it is for. One problem is that other than home base it would not fit in any hangar of near normal size and may not fit on many runways both for wingspan and weight. It could be to some extant a Rutan design, but is a bit more normal looking than some of the Rutan ones.

[1600vw]

There is a photo on news just now of the world's largest plane. Its 385 feet wingspan, hard to believe but weight is listed at 500,000 lbs..Its from Paul Allen of Microsoft.
Its dual fuselages with a center wing section, sort of like a P-38 and with 6 jet engines hung on the wings outside the fuselages.
Doesnt say what purpose, if any, it is for. One problem is that other than home base it would not fit in any hangar of near normal size and may not fit on many runways both for wingspan and weight. It could be to some extant a Rutan design.

Oh but they did say what this airplane was built for..

Tony

[rwanttaja]

There is a photo on news just now of the world's largest plane. Its 385 feet wingspan, hard to believe but weight is listed at 500,000 lbs..Its from Paul Allen of Microsoft.
Its dual fuselages with a center wing section, sort of like a P-38 and with 6 jet engines hung on the wings outside the fuselages.
Doesnt say what purpose, if any, it is for. One problem is that other than home base it would not fit in any hangar of near normal size and may not fit on many runways both for wingspan and weight. It could be to some extant a Rutan design.

Scaled Composites (Rutan's company) designed and built it. It's designed to launch orbital rockets from about 35,000 feet, avoiding the majority of the drag that the rocket would have to overcome. The concept is similar to that of the Orbital ATK "Pegasus" launch vehicle, which uses an L-1011, but has significantly more payload capacity.

The military has also been looking at it to support "launch on demand" scenarios.

Ron Wanttaja

[rwanttaja]

Found this video of a Pegasus XL launching from the L-1011. I expect the Stratolaunch to use the same basic Concept of Operations.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7_yyvGxwrE

I was the lead payload engineer on a satellite that launched on a Pegasus about 20 years ago.

Ron Wanttaja

[jethro99]

The flight deck crew reported that upon ignition of the rocket it sounds as if a freight train is coming through the air plane. They say that the L-1011 lurches upward upon the release of rocket, reported to weigh 80,000 pounds. A bit of an E ticket ride.

Bill Weaver of Lockheed, who was part of the flight crew, had an SR-71 come apart on him at over a thousand miles as hour. He was quite a guy. Laid back and unflappable. I asked about the possibility of the rocket failing to separate from the air plane and then the landing gear failing to deploy. No one wanted to even think of that as a possibility.

Interesting times.

[rwanttaja]

The flight deck crew reported that upon ignition of the rocket it sounds as if a freight train is coming through the air plane. They say that the L-1011 lurches upward upon the release of rocket, reported to weigh 80,000 pounds. A bit of an E ticket ride.

Bill Weaver of Lockheed, who was part of the flight crew, had an SR-71 come apart on him at over a thousand miles as hour. He was quite a guy. Laid back and unflappable. I asked about the possibility of the rocket failing to separate from the air plane and then the landing gear failing to deploy. No one wanted to even think of that as a possibility.
Neat stories, thanks. I presume they don't carry parachutes....

Wonder if they're going to build two of the Stratolaunch aircraft? If not, your launch schedule is hostage to the availability of a single aircraft. Something happens...accidental or deliberate...and your company comes to a screeching halt until it builds another one.

It's the same for ground launch pads (e.g., the explosion at the Alaskan launch facility a year or two back), but they can be repaired far faster than constructing an entire aircraft.

Hard on the payload customers, too. Normal launch flows are *years*, and if you've got to switch to another rocket, you'll have a long wait. Plus, if the designers use the advantages of the Stratolaunch system, they may not have the option of switching. Back when I worked on a payload for Pegasus, the launch system was having some problems and our launch date kept sliding. The customer looked into using a converted Russian ICBM, but the launch loads were tremendous in comparison.

Ron Wanttaja

[Bill Greenwood]

I'm not sure about that fuel this uses, but I'd bet that it is primarily powered by funding from taxpayers, now or in the future. The cost must be in the hundreds of millions$. Paul Allen can afford to spend a lot, but Id be surprised if he was funding this soley, with no retun. Id think he'd be to astute a businessman. Its not like a computer or software that the public is going to be a customer for, at least not knowingly. I dont think I have seen the photo or heard of the program before, or at least I didnt take notice of it.
It reminds me of the Spruce Goose and if I recall , Howard Hughes who had oil wealth from the invention of a major type of drill bit, received a lot of government funding.

[rwanttaja]

I'm not sure about that fuel this uses, but I'd bet that it is primarily powered by funding from taxpayers, now or in the future. The cost must be in the hundreds of millions$. Paul Allen can afford to spend a lot, but Id be surprised if he was funding this soley, with no retun. Its not like a computer or software that the public is going to be a customer for, at least not knowingly. I dont think I have seen the photo or heard of the program before, or at least I didnt take notice of it.
It reminds me of the Spruce Goose and if I recall , Howard Hughes who had oil wealth from the invention of a major type of drill bit, recieved a lot of government funding.
The program itself has been well-known in the space community.

I don't believe there is any announced Government involvement in this. If it's white budget, everything should be public record. The Spruce Goose was developed on a public Government contract. No secret the Fed were paying for it, and, of course, questions about its spending led to Congressional hearings.

There's no way to tell how much (or whether any) black budget has helped fund development of Stratolaunch. Traditionally, though, the ENTIRE project will be covert in this case...you don't release pictures of the rollout, or discuss the eventual performance of the system. The Government has it locked up. I just don't think that's the case, here.

It's quite possible, though, that the Government has paid Stratolaunch for feasibility studies. These may run from a half-million to ten million dollars or more. I worked a *lot* of these, in my 40 years as an aerospace engineer.

Basically, the Government may have paid the company to examine whether Stratolaunch can support particular Government needs. The company would be contracted to, for instance, determine what the minimum time to launch might be, and how the payloads would have to be configured to support this. The amounts would be low enough to basically just end up in the "Miscellaneous" section of the budget.

Studies like these could probably be worked at the unclassified, or, at most, the collateral level (Confidential, Secret, Top Secret). This would still be on white budgets.

Don't see these going to the compartmented (i.e., black budget) level, unless Stratolaunch is being considered to carry a particular classified spacecraft and the work requires specific access to design details. Don't see it, in this case. Besides, these higher levels require workers who are US citizens, possess expensive clearances (which are time-consuming to obtain), and approved heavily secured working facilities (including computer networks). A company *really* has to be anticipating a significant payday to invest in all that, and it's not really necessary for a launch provider performing feasibility studies.

Ron Wanttaja

[Jim Heffelfinger]

http://www.space.com/37046-stratolaunch-worlds-largest-airplane-first-rollout.html

http://www.stratolaunch.com/

6376

[Jim Heffelfinger]

https://www.cnet.com/pictures/meet-the-stratolaunch-the-worlds-largest-airplane/?ftag=ACQ9265a8a&vndid=1860861253&nan_pid=1860861253&ad_id=6365968