Stratolaunch

Huh, never thought they would actually build it.

it's been built and in a hangar for a couple years now. They're just double-double checking everything.

twitter.com/PaulGAllen/status/968168785076142080

Dance with the Angels motherfucker

Oh shit, that's pretty sweet. How much can it theoretically take up?

Paul Allen?

yeah this guy

youtube.com/watch?v=qAYY-MmonYU

the cockpit i mean

Because you’re already welding two entire 747’s together, might as well use it. iirc the cockpit on the left is the actual pilot one, the one on the left is emptY.

Think- how would the airplane take off when the rocket is strapped under it? It needs to be under a wing.

>she's a big boi

How does the rocket launch work? Does the rocket engine fire up while still being carried? Wouldn’t the forces be too strong on the plane?
And if not, then isn’t it dangerous to fire up the engines in free fall? Seems like a very difficult thing to do

We’ve been doing it since the 40s. I.e. every single experimental jet aircraft ever. And things like SS2 too. As for your question, it drops and then fires its engine after a few seconds. Plenty of distance between the aircraft and the rocket by then.

Heck, we did the opposite thing with the shuttle glide tests. The shuttle was disconnected while it was on TOP of the carrying airplane. They just banked in opposite directions.

>This system allows for a low launch cost
lol
meanwhile they spend what, 500 million+ on some meme plane totally unrelated to a fucking rocket

The meme plane allows for low launch costs. That’s the whole point. The rocket attaches in the middle

Maybe one for piloting the aircraft and one for launch control?

You'd need an impractically long ladder. Easier to just stick it to one side.

The only thing left from the 747s are the landing gear, cockpit windows, engines and iirc some of the hydraulics. Its pretty much an all new air frame.

There's also the existing Pegasus rocket which they actually plan on launching with it. Pegasus is probably the only thing Stratolaunch will end up launching as every other attempt to find someone to make them a rocket seems to have fallen through. In theory it can launch 3 at once but looking at the current flight rates for Pegasus really doubt they'll ever bother fitting it out for the job, much less actually launch 3 in one mission. So essentially all Stratolaunch will have accomplished is increasing the cost of a Pegasus launch because there's no way in hell this thing is cheaper to fly than Stargazer is.

Everything is handled from the right cockpit. The left side is just an empty shell. The windows are just there for looks. Left side isn't even cleared to carry people in it.

except it doesn't and it won't because 50,000 feet and 500 mph isn't shit for getting to orbit

50,000 feet is above almost all of the atmosphere, that has to help quite a bit, I'm sure they didn't build this without doing any calculations.

?
I'm sure that calculations are absolutely irrelevant in what they build

This is how space has worked for decades, you have scam artists pushing THEIR launch system getting funding from one source or another

It might come as a shock but rockets spend most of the effort on building up speed and not altitude. With a plane lifting you that high the largest gain you get is a big fat hard limit on rocket size.
This is just a meme to finance heavy aircraft transport. Could have some use in the military. I hate meme programs so goddamn much. Always there, always eating attention and money from actual spaceflight with the next super spaceplane or other bullshit idea.

Well it would allow you to use a higher nozzle expansion but it can't at all be worth the tradeoffs

It's not like this giant cargo plane is free either, its not like it has other uses during the 11 months of the year its not in use...

This shit plane alone costs more than the F9 development did.

found the guy who never played kerbal space program

Is he gonna try getting a reservation at Dorsia?

>those nigs begging in comments

ah to live in America

fuck you i have hundreds of hours in kerbal

It's an even bigger meme when you consider that Virgin Orbital (not to be confused with the massive failure that is Virgin Galactic) is going to launch their air-launched rocket LauncherOne on a modified 747 that used to belong to Virgin Atlantic. The first LauncherOne is already built and has done a wet dress rehearsal, also it's maiden flight is aimed for 2018 which means it's likely to fly a payload before StratoLaunch does.

The only thing that might save the StratoLaunch now is the commercial and military market trend towards smaller payloads and rockets e.g. Electron, Vector, XS-1 etc. This may give the StratoLaunch the opportunity to launch other rockets than the Pegasus which only flies once in a blue moon, and in turn actually become a profitable launch platform.

Small rockets are just a meme brought about by low launch rates of bigger rockets

>calculations are absolutely irrelevant
... says the innumerate mathtard.

>building up speed
Lrn2dynamic-pressure fgt pls

It's not a 747 at all.

High altitude flying allows for shorter travel time and less air resistance.

They actually spend most of their fuel fighting air resistance

that's just plain not true

How about something like this
>Horizontal In Line Launch Staging (HILLS)
>This is the joining of two delta wing aircraft, nose to tail, to operate as one aircraft powered by the first stage until separation to deliver the second stage to a more distant mission.
exospace.wordpress.com/about/

...

So do you not cunt the time and energy used to get up there?

>some guys shitty blog with some 3d modelling

I liked The Avengers too!

>You'd need an impractically long ladder.

I fucking love Veeky Forumsence.

I think there are some safety advantages to putting some distance between cockpit and rocket.

...

You aren't intending to bring up that shitheap as a positive example, are you?

not as a positive example, more as a "that hasn't been a concern in the past" example

The cockpit on the shuttle is because they're taking people to space. The people have to be on the rocket to go to space.

The cockpits on the Space Goose are because they're launching from a conventional aircraft. The farther you can keep people from the rocket, the more likely they are to survive a rocket problem.

pit of cocks > cockpit

While there are other factors at play, ease of crew access is a very real design concern. Having the cockpit in the wing above the centerline means your stairway/ladder/what have you needs to be nearly 3 times as tall and needs to reach around the rocket currently slung directly under the cockpit. Easier to just stick them off to the side. It's not like there's anything else that would go there.

How many of these sorts of launch systems exist? What is that one where they were designing a different type of jet/rocket engine for?

what about putting a walkway across the central wing so you can go up from one of the side bodies

100% this

The versatility and weather tolerance is neat, but I doubt most people will really care. How much fuel does this kind of launch save? I know Pegasus rockets are small, but IIRC they don't carry much payload either.

It doesn't save a dime, it COSTS MONEY and imposes upper limits on the size of the rocket, forbidding any amount of actual improvement.

This is the issue with dumb rich people being fed a scam by some scam artist.

>It doesn't save a dime
What makes you say that? Reducing the expendable part of a launch system isn't a new idea.

>imposes upper limits on the size of the rocket
Not very strict ones. There are plenty of commercially successful rockets smaller than the Pegasus II they were considering carrying, and I'll bet that isn't the upper bound for what the plane can lift.

>This is the issue with dumb rich people being fed a scam by some scam artist.
?????

the sad part is all of this R&D is irrelevant when BFR is flying. It sounds memey, but it's true.

> Reducing the expendable part of a launch system isn't a new idea.
Big planes cost hundreds of millions
And they used 2 of em, totally customized

The development process of this plane alone would have fully funded an orbital medium lift rocket similar to the Falcon 9

They don't even have a fucking rocket to take advantage of the fact they've built the largest plane in the world either! So its all just a big joke.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burt_Rutan
It's done by a plane guy, so all his orbital schemes involve planes. Even when it makes no sense at all. This is the thing holding back space for decades, you have people pushing their pet projects rather than sane cost concious developments

>Big planes cost hundreds of millions
Not per flight. The idea is you get the plane back after each launch.

>The development process of this plane alone would have fully funded an orbital medium lift rocket similar to the Falcon 9
Eh, I don't really care. I was asking about the cost to fly it, not to draw it.

>This is the thing holding back space for decades
Hahaha no.

>plane guy pushing maymay planes because the the public understands them more than scary rockets
This shit has been going on since the 60's. I'm buttblasted right now.

>Hahaha no.
Yes it literally is
Fucking Shuttle was a DISASTER because of the plane meme
So much other money has been wasted on making ridiculous plane/rockets

Other money is wasted on meme high performance engines or going liquid hydrogen for "muh Isp"
Imagine if they made a reusable Falcon style rocket in the 70's instead of the Shuttle, then scaled it up

You got these scam artists wasting all the investment money of anyone who wants to invest in space too

>inb4 landing is impossible with old tech

Bruh, do you even Galm?

Except it was impossible. The computers to control the descent would have weighed too much to be practical, and more importantly, there wasn't enough computing power to simulate all the dynamic loading on the spaceframe, forcing it to be overbuilt and very heavy.

a: You can do it remotely
B: You could put a man in the first stage
C: You could have it boost back to lightly land in a fresh water lake avoiding all the issues of salt-water & the ocean.

Yes it would be different, yes it would be less mass efficient, yes they would need seperate landing engines that are naturally stable.
But it was very much doable.

Wrong. Barge landings are out of the question but ones on large pads or water splashdowns are perfectly doable even without having to risk a person to pilot it. The LM was more or less capable of automated landing btw and is also example of vertical landing rocket with 50's 60's tech on unprepared and hostile terrain with no ground radar support. As for the lack of simulations this applies to most things made at the time - build it, test, fix and repeat until it stops exploding. Less efficient - definitely, but again, this applies to virtually everything done at the time and is not particularly strong argument.

The reason it wasn't pursued was entirely unrelated to the engineering challenges. There was simply no support for such things and rocketry was considered dated expensive technology compared to the future space planes that are just around the corner. Likely, there were some nazi nuances thrown in as well.

>I know Pegasus rockets are small, but IIRC they don't carry much payload either.

lol those things are $20-30 million

>Yes it literally is
>Fucking Shuttle was a DISASTER because of the plane meme
Spaceplanes and plane-launched rockets have almost nothing to do with each other.

They are only relevant if they are performed honestly, and then actually used.

It can launch only 6 ton to low orbit, its complete Kerbal joke.

>This is the thing holding back space for decades, you have people pushing their pet projects rather than sane cost concious developments

Are you saying that if this BFP wasn't being built, and all the other "pet projects," those guys would just automatically funnel all the same money into whatever project you think is the sane cost conscious one?

I'd think it more likely that they'd just not spend money on space projects at all.

Some people only need 6 tons.

they are both planes

If it wasn't being wasted on stuff like a billion dollars for a ridiculous cargo plane that has no payload ?
Yes perhaps maybe it would be for some scheme that makes sense

Alright, there's lots of debating here, but are there actually any concrete numbers on how much fuel would be saved by an air to space launch? I mean, it's not the first of these systems to be proposed, and they wouldn't put hundreds of millions into it for nothing, surely there must be a practical claim to be made.

>perhaps

Or perhaps gazillionairs would just not spend it on space at all, but on some other glittery thing that caught their eye.

Either way, "perhaps" is a long way from the absolute certainty expressed by some earlier posts.

No doubt if it wasn't THIS particular scam being sold to them, it would be some other scam.

>nd they wouldn't put hundreds of millions into it for nothing
lol, is this a joke? Of course they would have. Thats been the norm of space development for decades.

They don't even have a rocket to launch using this aircraft! They are just going to be flying their old Pegasus rockets which weigh 24 tons, when they built some heavy lift plane that can lift 250 tons!

Alright, any concrete numbers on fuel savings then?

>Not per flight. The idea is you get the plane back after each launch.
They don't cost hundreds of millions per flight but there's no way in hell this bird is going to be cheaper to operate than the current Pegasus mother ship. So far all they've succeeded in doing is restrict the airports Pegasus can launch from while also increasing the cost to operate the mothership.

iirc it can shave off a ~1 km/s of Delta-V and that most of the savings are due to the reduction in drag from not having to fly through the thickest part of the atmosphere.

>there's no way in hell this bird is going to be cheaper to operate than the current Pegasus mother ship
That's a pretty unfair comparison, given it can lift a vastly bigger an heaver rocket than the Pegasus.

One problem with the TriStar used for the Pegasus: it is decades obsolete, the last of its kind still flying. That alone makes is a large drain on the company, especially when it only launches every other year.

And Stratolaunch's custom behemoth will be even more costly to certify and maintain.

Orbital never claimed air-launch was about cost-savings. It is more about convenience: you can launch Pegasus from most airports, aim it to any orbital inclination, and fly above the weather to avoid launch delays.

The whole point is that an egotistic billionaire has an excuse the build the largest airplane to ever fly, eclipsing the record held by the Spruce Goose... made by an earlier egotistic billionaire.

Its actual function is almost beside the point. It is extremely overbuilt for just launching a Pegasus.

what happens if both the pilots turn left and right respectively at the same time?

>As for the lack of simulations this applies to most things made at the time - build it, test, fix and repeat until it stops exploding
So how did that strategy work out for the soviet N-1?

It worked out fine I guess?

>flying wing whale shark covered in hexagons
>F-15s
Seems realistic

>So how did that strategy work out for the soviet N-1?

How would it have worked out if they had a test stand big enough to test engines all together instead of having to launch to test?

We'll never know -- and they stopped trying the launch-and-see approach shortly after losing the race to the moon and moving on to other projects.

>F-15s

Oh sorry, they're LanTek T-3700 mk. II's but obviously I'd know that if I read the Skyfighter Crystalwarrior wikia

>It worked out fine I guess?
You have a strange definition of "fine" if it includes zero successful launches and losing the space race.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sukhoi_Su-27
Top pleb.

The worst part is the public will lap this up because every idiot in his shed has thought "if I launch a rocket from a balloon I could get into orbit easily!" at some point

Hypersonic flight is very hard.
Two aircraft separating while flying at hypersonic speed is very harder

As if I give a fuck
Knowing that makes you more of an idiot than not knowing