Paul Allen Launches Commercial Spaceship Project

smitty777 writes "The phrase 'Where do you want to go today?' takes on a whole new meaning as Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder and the world's 57th richest man in the world, looks to create a new spaceship company. Stratolaunch Systems plans to bring 'airport like operations' to the world of private space travel. Partnering with Burt Rutan, the plan is to field a test within five years and commercially available flights within ten. Spacecraft will be air-launched from a giant, six-engined aircraft. There is more information available on the Stratolaunch homepage."

Comments

Re:Where do you want to go, toady?

[mosb1000]

Just so you know, Allen originally funded space ship one, so it's more like Branson copied him.

Excellent Team

[DanielRavenNest]

Paul Allen for the money spigot, Burt Rutan for the carrier aircraft, and Elon Musk/SpaceX for the rocket stages. When I worked on such concepts many years ago at Boeing, we generally found that launching from altitude like that doubles the payload compared to the same rocket starting from the ground, so it makes a lot of sense from an engineering and cost sense, as long as the carrier aircraft costs less than the rocket stages per flight (normally easy to do).

This design overcomes one limitation we had at Boeing, which was the 747 was not quite large enough in it's current form. By going to six engines of the same size as the 747 uses, they solved that problem. Eventually they can also look at flying back the first rocket stage, for even more savings. Once it is empty of fuel, the rocket stage does not weigh much, so it would not take much in the way of wings, landing gear, and some small jet engines so it can fly to a landing. Without knowing how far it will go on a ballistic arc doing it's launch job, it is hard to say if it should fly back to the launch site, or fly forward to another landing location.

Why 747 engines instead of 777?

[Michael Woodhams]

747-400 engines have thrust between 265 and 282 kN (depending on engine model). 777 engines have thrust between 338 and 514 kN. You can get more thrust out of four 777 engines than you can six 747 engines. The design has a high wing, so engine diameter isn't an issue. Why use six engines instead of four?

(A330 and A380 engines have only a small advantage over 747, at 310-320 kN.)

The 747-400 has been around 6 more years than the 777, and 747-300 much longer again. Maybe they can get six used 747 engines much cheaper than four used 777 engines. As a low-usage aircraft, it makes sense to have increased maintenance costs if it saves enough on capital costs.