more at
https://www.thedailybeast.com/paul-a...dy-for-takeoff
When you have the wealth of billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen what do
you want for Christmas? After all, the guy has two yachts, one of them one of
the world’s largest, a 414-foot vessel named Octopus (suggestions of a Bond
villain) with two helicopters and a 10-person submarine, plus nine mansions on
Mercer Island in Seattle and homes in London, France, New York, Beverly Hills,
and Hawaii.
How about the world’s largest airplane?
During the last two months the desert around Mojave, California, has
reverberated with the deep thunder of jet engines being tested. The Mojave
airfield is home to a private collective of aerospace futurists, so the folk who
live there are used to the sudden eruption of rocket motors flaring up on short
runs. But this was different: recurrent and long runs of multiple jet engines.
The engines, six of them, belonged to an aviation goliath, the largest airplane
by wingspan ever to emerge from a hangar anywhere. It’s called the
Stratolauncher and it’s Paul Allen’s brainchild. As with most trips to the outer
edge of what is possible, this project is well behind schedule. But, if Allen is
lucky, by Christmas he could be within weeks of seeing his monster fly.
This is not a vanity project. It seeks to prove what seems like a very basic
premise: that if you launch a rocket into orbit from 35,000 feet instead of from
the ground it’s a lot more efficient. It doesn’t require the enormous thrust
needed to initially defy gravity and leave a launch pad and so the conventional
first stage of a rocket is eliminated.
Stratolauncher is designed to launch leaner, lighter rockets that, after being
released from the airplane, scorch a path into low Earth orbit where they
release not one satellite but a bundle of small satellites.
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