Check out the new "Stratolaunch" from Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, Elon Musk, and Michael Griffin...

LINKY TO SFN

Nice animation, if overly simplified. Spaceship One on massive steroids!

It's got the technical experience (Rutan and Musk), it's got the money (Allen and Musk), and it's got the support of a former NASA chief (Griffin). Possibly doable?

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I just saw a story about this on the Boeing internal news clips.....and wondered if there might be some discussion here.

Right now I don't know what to think.

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Bernard Cawley
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The video shows climb to deploy which was originally scheduled for Pegasus, SS1, SS2 and in all cases changed to more practical drop and burn. There are kinetics issues at work there. It also proposes a 30k altitude not 50+k so the main benefits are not air launch for energy management, but launch site selection. Sea Launch does that, as well as simply situating rockets worldwide.

However the principals have a history of doing what they say, and in the space launch field that is a rare thing.

I see liquids are being used to depart from the safety/accident track record of N2O.

Scaled/Northrup had to modify the hangar they have now to account for a wingspan increase for WK2.

Jerry

Just looking at the graphics it looks like a SpaceX Falcon 5 (yes there was such a beast, just that SpaceX never bothered building it-- they went straight from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9, basically morphed Falcon 5 into a Falcon 9. They're showing a dragon on the front and 5 Merlin 1-C's in the back (by all appearances).

I don't see this being any more efficient than an optimized ground launched vertical takeoff rocket... the development and operations costs are going to be the killer on something like this... as well as the details. Getting a clean separation and ignition of a half-million pound rocket and payload from a modified megajet version of an airliner isn't going to be trivial. Yeah, I know, OSC does it with Pegasus all the time, but this is MUCH bigger than Pegasus, and will be an order of magnitude more expensive and difficult to achieve.

What's the purpose of the large aft-body wing on the booster rocket?? It's too far aft and the CG is all wrong for it to be for gliding... trying to get a little extra lift early in the burn?? They don't show any glide recovery of the first stage, so presumably it's not for that. IF they COULD glide-recover the first stage, THAT might make this thing more attractive... even then, the operations costs have to be competitive with disposable launchers, and that's going to be a very tough nut to crack.

I don't see this really going anywhere... there are too many BIG TICKET issues facing it and development costs are going to be astronomical, billionaire or no behind it... The X-Prize was how many years ago and we have YET to see SS2 flying?? Even for this supposedly "burgeoning" suborbital tourist biz that's chomping at the bit to go??

I think SpaceX would be wiser to focus on reliably fulfilling their contracted deliveries to ISS for their paying customer, NASA, while using those flights to gain experience for perhaps recovering their first stages intact. If they can do that, they'll blow this thing out of the water anyway. That, and focus their efforts on Falcon Heavy, and getting to be a serious competitor in the launch business. If they can accomplish that, they'll be well on their way and can then pursue these "pie in the sky" type plans... though they'd probably be better off working toward Merlin 2 and Raptor and giving ULA and run for their money, IMHO...

Later! OL JR

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The proposal more resembles a Luft 46 project.

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Looks like a jet version of the Spruce Goose to me.
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Very left-field question: Could this be a diversion of attention from something else?

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An excellent and insightful question! Maybe its purpose is to lead SpaceX's competitors down a blind alley ("If Elon thinks this will work and be profitable, then we have to beat him and develop our own version first!") while also creating an option for air-launching fully-reusable orbital spaceplanes farther down the road? (The Teledyne Brown Spaceplane proposal of the late 1980s [see: http://www.xcor.com/products/vehicl...spaceplane.html ] called for using a Boeing 747 as the launch aircraft. The unpiloted vehicle would have used four RL-10s and one SSME to reach orbit with a 6 - 7 ton payload without any further staging, and its cargo bay would have been the same shape and size as the Shuttle's, but shorter [21' long, if I recall correctly].) Also:

The huge Stratolaunch aircraft could earn its keep in the meantime by carrying heavy and/or out-size cargoes, including stages for other launch vehicles (perhaps in a streamlined pod); such payloads could be attached to the plane's mid-wing launch hardpoints. The aircraft could even be used to launch other companies' expendable liquid propellant and/or solid propellant satellite launch vehicles under contract.

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Something else makes me suspect that Paul Allen, Elon Musk, and Burt Rutan have bigger goals in mind for the Stratolaunch aircraft. As former Teledyne Brown (now XCOR Aerospace) spaceplane designer Dan Delong said in reference to air-launched orbital spaceplanes (see: http://www.xcor.com/products/vehicl...spaceplane.html )--his quotation is reproduced below:
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DeLong found that while air launching confers advantages on orbital launch systems, these advantages are not always obvious and they do involve trade-offs. “The contribution of the carrier aircraft to the launch vehicle’s actual altitude and velocity is actually pretty small. The release angle actually helps more than the initial altitude.” he said, but there are several other factors that significantly affect performance. These include the ability to design the engines to be more efficient because they do not need to operate in high density air. In return for the greater complexity and cost of using two vehicles, air launching gives engineers more freedom in designing landing gear, wings, and other parts of the launchers that improve performance. Most importantly, the advantage of air-launching an orbital system is that it allows a single upper stage to make it to orbit without the nearly impossible difficulties of Single-Stage-To-Orbit (SSTO).
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