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Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen Unveils World's Biggest Plane (seattletimes.com)
Frosty Piss quotes a report from The Seattle Times: The huge Stratolaunch finally rolled out of its hangar in Mojave, Calif., Wednesday for the first time. Built by Paul Allen's Scaled Composites, the twin hulled monster will go through months of ground tests before a first flight. Jean Floyd, chief executive at Stratolaunch Systems, said in a statement that the empty airplane, powered by six used 747 engines, weighs approximately 500,000 pounds. The jet will have a three-person crew: pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer in the flight deck of the starboard fuselage, while the port fuselage cockpit is empty and unpressurized. Stratolaunch is intended to carry a rocket slung beneath the central part of the wing, between the two fuselages, and release it at 35,000 feet. The concept is that the rocket will then launch into space and deliver satellites into orbit.
TFA doesn't load at all if you don't permit Javascript, because it is not a web page. Wired is offering an actual web page on the same subject, which is more suitable for linking to a site for nerds like Slashdot, where noscript is common.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
space is up, not sideways
Actually space is mostly sideways. https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/
But I agree that the extra complexity from a plane launch is probably not worth the trouble.
Exactly. That thing will snap in half the moment it leaves the ground. If it does survive being airborne, it will never survive a landing.
Why? Justify your comment with an explaination. And before you do so remember the following:
1. Vertical forces pull a wing up. All wings bend in service. Twin-fuselage planes simply have an additional weight on the wing as seen from each fuselage, what this means in practice is that the the wing joining the two fuselages will see *less* stress than those on the outside or those of typical planes.
2. When landing all force is centred on the wheels which are directly under the heaviest parts of the plane. Again the joining wing will see the least stress of any parts.
3. Twin-fuselage is a thing and there have been over 30 designs of such planes built for various purposes including military, cargo, and most recently launching of a secondary vehicle.
4. Not only will it not snap, but due to the little stress involved you would quite comfortably carry another aircraft in the middle, a design that has been successfully used by White Knight 2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - there's a picture of it flying.