Article and video here. I’m wondering how having the pilot bay on one side for the plane will work out.
I wonder how much fuel the rocket is saving being launched high.
Short video is worth a look.
Fascinating… but if you don’t mind, I’m not clicking that Yahoo link. Currently, Yahoo’s advertising service is afestering swamp of malware.
Anyway, there’s ample precedent for air-launched orbital and sub-orbital space launch vehicles, but this seems to be the biggest I’ve ever heard of.
According to the Wikipedia article, Orbital Sciences was to provide the launch vehicle, but Stratolaunch fired 'em so the actual rocket science part of the project is (not yet) up in the air.
The original space launch vehicle was going to be a highly modified Falcon 9 before someone figured out that the necessary structural reinforcements to carry the vehicle horizontally through launch were not practical. The Orbital Sciences vehicle was going to be the commercial Castor 120 first stage (also the first stage for the Taurus and the first two stages of the Lockheed Martin Athena II) with a Castor 30 upper stage (used on the Athena II and Antares rocket) and some unspecified liquid apogee stage (probably Super-HAPS). This apparently turned out to be uneconomical (probably due to the cost of the Castor 120) and Stratolaunch is apparently viewing a large number of alternative configurations, all of which are roughly the size of an Athena or Minotaur IV.
The value of an air-launched SLV isn’t the reduction of propellant but the ability to select a more optimal launch azimuth and also avoid ground wind limitations and ground launch facility logistics, as I discuss [POST=13915667]here[/POST]. The tradeoff is that you need a carrier aircraft and a means to deploy reliability in flight, which can be quite challenging. Orbital Sciences (now Orbital ATK) launched the first successful commercial space launch vehicle 25 years ago with the Pegasus, and it’s proven to be a reasonably reliable vehicle in the small sat delivery category, but at a launch cost exceeding US$10k/kg it has not been any more cost effective than larger and more capable vehicles. However, there are a handful of other air-launch ventures focused on the nascent smallsat market, the foremost of which is GOLauncher 2, which I’ve been watching with some interest. But launching something as large as an Athena from an aircraft strikes me as more of a stunt than a cost-effective launch platform.
Stranger
That’s how air-launching an ICBM always struck me: a stunt. But I guess in the mid-70s “mobile launcher panic”, I suspect nothing was completely off-limits.
I got about as far as “Monster 6 engine, dual fuselage, 385 ft …” before I heard Tim Taylor grunting in my head.
You can tell Rutan retired from Scaled Composites - that thing is ugly. His designs always had a kind of beauty to them.
It’s right hand drive!
Is it British?