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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.'"
Is it made of spruce?
The tradition has always been using wood to make large planes for billionaires in california.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Strange design.
I dunno . . . I think I saw a similar critter on one of Gerry Anderson's show . . . "Thunderbirds" or "U.F.O."
It'll be interesting to see it fly...
Be sure to look close, to see if you can spot puppet wires holding it up.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Yeah, I don't understand the purpose of this project. Yes, you can launch Pegasus rockets from anywhere you choose, as long as you can find a runway long enough for this monster, and hopefully your launch facility has enough LOX and RP-1 for you to use. Probably best if your launch point is over water or unpopulated areas since most people don't appreciate having rocket stages dropped on their heads. But these sort of restrictions are no match for a man with vision!
I imagine Elon sent them a nice card congratulating them on having a reusable first stage. The Stratolaunch team has been trying to reassure people that this is not a billionaire's vanity project. We'll see what the score is when they figure out what their cost-per-kg to LEO is, but really I think that this situation could have been avoided by buying Paul a copy of KSP and having him play that until he figures out why this is a bad idea.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Yeh because nobody could posdibly calculate the stresses, and bulid an appropriate spar. Even for a shit poster, you are a dumb cunt.
If you launch from a plane you can use a much smaller rocket - hence the cost savings.
If you can reuse the rocket, it doesn't matter much if it's bigger. And the difference apparently isn't that great. According the Musk, you only save about 5% by launching from a plane[1]. Add the cost of the plane itself, the more complicated launch, plus the fact that you'll be limited to small rockets and payloads, and it's clear why they didn't choose this path.
[1] http://shitelonsays.com/transc...
You could vent the LOX without too much trouble, I suppose.
Sea level air density is 12.25, while at 30,000ft it is 0.1841.
http://www.engineeringtoolbox....
The height is not the major problem. When the ISS passes over your head, it is less than 250 miles away from you, if it were on the ground you could drive to it in half a day. The major problem is getting to orbital velocity. A rocket's payload has to be accelerated to 17,700 mph in the right direction to achieve orbit. Allen's Stratolaunch will provide the first 3% of that speed. Compared to a traditional 10 ton rocket to place 1 ton in LEO, there would be a savings of 0.25 tons of rocket fuel. Since Stratolaunch is designed to launch three rockets per trip, there are considerable savings in preparation and maintenance costs. And of course jet fuel is much less expensive than rocket fuel, especially when you consider the special handling rocket fuels require. Air launch to orbit make a lot of sense.
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.
> I'm not a rocket scientist. What am I missing here?
It so happens I am - see my space systems engineering book for proof ( http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... )
Launching from a carrier airplane at 10 km altitude approximately doubles the payload compared to the same rocket starting from the ground. The Pegasus rocket launched from an L-1011 airplane showed this. You can watch a SpaceX launch video to understand why. It takes a Falcon 9 about 1 minute to reach 10 km altitude and Mach 1, which is about the conditions for an air-launch. During this time, the first stage consumes about 45% of the fuel it carries. The flight to this point has been more vertical than horizontal. When you are thrusting upwards, it is counter to the Earth's gravity, so the acceleration is less than if you were thrusting horizontally. You are also fighting drag, and the back-pressure of the Earth's atmosphere. When you start at altitude, and oriented mostly horizontal, all these forces reducing your performance are minimized. So the fuel you burn is used more efficiently, resulting in more payload than just the avoided fuel burn from the first stage. The net result is about a doubling of payload.
So what good is this? Airplanes fly many many times, so the cost of the plane is divided by the number of times you fly it. In fact, this airplane recycles parts from two used 747's, so it cost less to build than an entirely new one would. The 500,000 lb of drop mass it can lift can include a reusable first stage rocket, and a fairly small second stage. This would reduce the throw-away hardware for each flight dramatically.
The first version of this plane will be carrying new Pegasus rockets, like the old L-1011 did. I think that's because Paul Allen has put limited amounts of his money into this project. Once they get the plane working, the next step would be to develop the rocket stage. It's possible they would look for outside funding or partners for that part. From a business standpoint, their problem is the airplane part took so long to develop, that they have two serious competitors already building reusable rockets (SpaceX and Blue Origin). A carrier plane has some advantages over a fixed launch site, like being able to avoid bad weather, and a wider range of launch times and inclinations. It can also serve other markets, like oversize cargo delivery. But I see it as a "come from behind" situation for space launch.
Sarcasm and ignorance have many of the same features in their most basic form. Never consider a sentence as sarcasm unless it is perfectly clear that it is so as you would be masking a large underlying problem in communication and understanding.