Tag: Stratolaunch

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Stratolaunch’s rocket preburner hits full power

Stratolaunch preburner test
The preburner for Stratolaunch’s PGA rocket engine blazes during a hot-fire test. (Stratolaunch via Twitter)

Chalk up another milestone for Stratolaunch Systems’ rocket engine development effort: The Seattle-based space company founded by late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen says it ramped up the preburner for its PGA rocket engine to full power this week during hot-fire tests.

Stratolaunch’s 3D-printed preburner, a key component that typically begins a rocket engine’s combustion process, had its first hot firing less than a month ago at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. And just a year ago, the hardware was merely a twinkle in the eye of Stratolaunch’s engineers.

“Per public records, this is the fastest preburner development in U.S. history,” Hanna Steplewska Kubiak, Stratolaunch’s vice president of business development,  tweeted.

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Stratolaunch fires up its rocket engine preburner

Preburner test firing
A full-scale fuel preburner for Stratolaunch’s PGA rocket engine undergoes a test firing at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. (Stratolaunch Photo)

Stratolaunch Systems, the space venture founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, says it has successfully completed the first hot-fire test of a key component for its hydrogen-fueled PGA rocket engine.

The full-scale hydrogen preburner was fired up last Friday at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, less than a year after design work started.

“This is the first step in proving the performance and highly efficient design of the PGA engine. The hot-fire test is an incredible milestone for both the propulsion team and Stratolaunch,” Jeff Thornburg, vice president of propulsion at Stratolaunch, said today in a news release.

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Paul Allen’s death leaves unfinished space business

Paul Allen on Stratolaunch plane
Paul Allen stands on the wing of the giant Stratolaunch plane during a March 2017 tour of the hangar in Mojave, Calif., where the craft was being assembled. The plane’s tail is in the background. (Paul Allen via Twitter)

Seattle billionaire philanthropist Paul Allen’s death comes just as his Stratolaunch space venture is counting down to the first flight of the world’s biggest airplane — and lifting the veil on a wide range of space applications.

Now it’s up to the Stratolaunch team to make good on the high-flyingest idea from the self-described “Idea Man,” who succumbed to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 65.

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Giant Stratolaunch plane gets closer to first flight

Stratolaunch taxi test
Mountains loom in the distance as Stratolaunch Systems’ twin-fuselage airplane is taken out for testing at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port. (Stratolaunch Photo via Twitter)

The world’s biggest airplane, built by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch Systems, is one step closer to making its first flight after buzzing down the runway at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port this week at speeds as fast as 80 mph.

Stratolaunch’s latest round of taxi tests checked off another item on the seven-year-old company’s to-do list in advance of flight testing. Those test flights are expected to lead to in-the-air rocket launches by as early as 2020.

Based on a development plan laid out this spring, future rounds of taxi tests should reach on-the-ground speeds of roughly 100 mph, and then 140 mph. A speed of 140 mph, or 120 knots, is roughly what it’ll take for takeoff of the twin-fuselage plane, which has a record-setting wingspan of 385 feet.

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NanoRacks names its space outpost team

Orbital outpost
An artist’s conception shows a Centaur upper-stage booster that’s been outfitted to become an orbital outpost. (NanoRacks Illustration)

It takes a village to raise an space outpost, and NanoRacks’ array of villagers includes Stratolaunch as well as Olis Robotics, the startup formerly known as BluHaptics.

NanoRacks, which is headquartered in Texas, today listed those two Seattle-based companies among its partners for a NASA-funded study focusing on the future of commercial human spaceflight in low Earth orbit.

The study is one of 13 that were commissioned by NASA in August as part of its drive to commercialize orbital operations by 2025. That drive could involve handing over the U.S. segment of the International Space Station to private-sector management, or developing brand-new orbital platforms.

NanoRacks has proposed retrofitting the spent upper stages from United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rockets and its yet-to-be-built Vulcan rockets to create habitable outposts. The company unveiled its plan for the first outpost, dubbed Independence-1, in April.

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Stratolaunch lifts the veil on PGA rocket engine

Stratolaunch PGA rocket engine
An artist’s conception shows Stratolaunch’s PGA rocket engine. (Stratolaunch Illustration)

The name of Stratolaunch Systems’ home-grown rocket engine leaves no doubt about who’s footing the bill: It’s called the PGA, as in Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen.

Stratolaunch has made glancing references to its in-house propulsion system development program over the past few months — for example, in its announcement about the full line of rocket-powered vehicles intended for midflight launch from its super-jumbo airplane, or in its proposed roadmap for hypersonic flight tests.

But the PGA rocket engine took center stage today in a report from Aviation Week and in a series of photos released by the Stratolaunch team.

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Stratolaunch’s giant plane spotted from space

Stratolaunch plane
Stratolaunch’s giant airplane sits outside its hangar at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port in a picture captured on Sept. 22 by DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-1 satellite from an altitude of more than 300 miles. Click on the image for a larger version. (Satellite Image ©2018 DigitalGlobe, a Maxar Company)

How big is the world’s biggest airplane? So big that it shows up clearly in a black-and-white photo taken by DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-1 satellite on Sept. 22.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch space venture took the 385-foot-wide, twin-fuselage airplane out of its hangar at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port for testing over the weekend, at just the right time for WorldView-1’s overflight.

The timing was the key factor behind the shot, which took advantage of WorldView-1’s capability to snap panchromatic pictures with a resolution of 50 centimeters (20 inches) per pixel. That resolution isn’t good enough to read license plates (or the logos painted on the side of the plane), but it is good enough to make an impression.

“We knew it was big, but seeing this view … whoa,” Allen’s Vulcan Inc. said in a tweet.

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Stratolaunch lays out roadmap for hypersonic planes

Stratolaunch hypersonic testbed
Stratolaunch’s swept-wing hypersonic testbed would be propelled by a rocket engine. (Stratolaunch Illustration)

Stratolaunch Systems, the aerospace company created by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, says it’s exploring the development of a series of rocket planes that would serve as a testbed for hypersonic flight.

Stephen Corda, Stratolaunch’s senior technical fellow for hypersonics, presented the concept this week at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ International Space Planes and Hypersonic Systems and Technologies conference in Orlando, Fla.

If Stratolaunch follows through on the concept, the company could use the world’s largest airplane as a launch platform for an uncrewed aerospace plane that travels at more than 10 times the speed of sound, or Mach 10.

Hypersonic vehicles rank among the top technological frontiers for Pentagon officials, who have sounded the alarm about hypersonic weapon development programs in Russia and China. But it’s not yet clear whether Stratolaunch will join the hypersonic aerospace race.

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Stratolaunch puts its brand on world’s biggest plane

Stratolaunch plane
Stratolaunch Systems’ giant plane now sports the company’s name. (Stratolaunch Photo via Twitter)

The mammoth plane that Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch Systems is testing at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port now bears the name of the billionaire and his air-launch venture.

In photos tweeted this week, Stratolaunch showed off the plane’s new livery — including a legend reading “Stratolaunch: A Paul G. Allen Company” on the side of one of the twin fuselages, and the logo of plane builder Scaled Composites on the tail.

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Stratolaunch plans new rockets (and space plane)

Stratolaunch lineup
Artwork shows Stratolaunch’s giant carrier plane and several classes of launch vehicles, including Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus rocket, a medium-class rocket and its heavy-lift variant, and a fully reusable space plane. (Stratolaunch Illustration)

Stratolaunch, the space venture created by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2011, today provided the first details about a new family of launch vehicles it has in the works, including two types of rockets and a reusable space plane that could someday carry astronauts to orbit.

The revelation follows up on rumblings that Stratolaunch has been working on its own rockets and a “Black Ice” space plane, along with the world’s biggest airplane to launch them from.

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