Stratolaunch: General Company and Development Updates and Discussions

[Prober]

Now that VTVL looks to be moving much faster than everything else, then what's so special about the Stratolaunch approach that makes it worth saving? What could it do that others might not be able to do?

I'm thinking the aircraft needs to be adapted for ferrying rocket stages rather than transporting them by highway.

  How does VTVL impact Stratolaunch in any way? The ability to recover a rocket not only has nothing to do with increasing it's capability. It actually decreases it quite a bit.

It's worth pointing out that you can combine VTVL and air-launch (technically it would be Air-launched/Vertical Landing--ALVL) just fine, and get a lot of the benefits of both air-launch and VTVL without needing a boostback burn or a drone ship...

~Jon

or you can go further make the core expendable, and recover only the engines (see ULA). 






 

[Asteroza]

So that would be ALVL-boost forward when home base is ahead of the launch point, but ALVL with convenient incidental boost stage retrieval cargo shipping when home base is behind the launch point then?

[RanulfC]

So that would be ALVL-boost forward when home base is ahead of the launch point, but ALVL with convenient incidental boost stage retrieval cargo shipping when home base is behind the launch point then?

The point is that with Air Launch you can ALWAYS position the flight so that you can land the booster down-range (at home) so you don't have to use boost-back or a barge landing.

In general the idea of landing the returning stage with by "passive" means (no restart or dedicated propellant) with wings or such, (hmmm, air-launched ROTON, nope, walking away from that one...) reduces your reuse penalty in some way and enhances your operations. In practice? Well we haven't really tried a huge number of options so I'd say we probably need to try MORE rather than assume one method is the "killer" method.

Randy

[Danderman]

The best fit of an existing rocket with Stratolaunch is Soyuz 2-1V.

[ChrisWilson68]

Why VG bought their own 747 for Launcherone instead of using ROC ? Failure of business cooperation?

Because they already owned it. It was part of the Virgin Atlantic fleet. It's just shuffling money between corporations owned by the same people.

I don't believe that.  The ownership structures of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Galactic are very different.  Virgin Galactic is largely financed by Aabar, not other Virgin entities or Branson personally.

Anyway Virgin Atlantic isn't the only company retiring 747s, so there's a market for these retired planes.  Whether the residual value is very low (scrap only) or high, Virgin Atlantic could have sold the plane to someone for about what it would have cost Virgin Galactic to buy it from somebody else.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.  Even if Virgin Galactic and Virgin Atlantic had identical ownership, at best transferring from one entity to the other saves only the ask-buy spread in the market for used 747s for the combined entity.

[ChrisWilson68]

They believe that there is a market for rapid access to space. Nobody has acheived rapid access to space. So they are competing against every one else that has yet to acheive that (including SpaceX).

I am struggling to understand how the air launch concept is any more rapid than traditional launchers.  Moving a rocket to a fixed launch pad seems to me like it would be easier and more rapid than putting one on an airplane.  I don't see any reason why the air launch approach should give any savings in pre-launch processing time as compared to ground launch.  Am I missing something?

Part of the problem with a fixed launcher position is timing for orbits, as well as orbital inclinations.  With a mobile platform like a plane the launch window becomes vastly larger and orbital inclinations are only a problem of where the booster will splash down. (You don't want it over land, unless of course you figuire out some sort of a magical recoverable orbital booster system).

With a plane, you can go from equatorial all the way through polar orbital inclinations.

Timing can be mostly resolved with storable solid or hybrid boosters, and a ready reserve of orbital craft or satillite devivery stages.

Ground-launched systems can go to a wide variety of orbits with dog-leg maneuvers, at a high cost to payload.  But, air launch has much more limited payload capability to begin with.  So, you need to look at what a ground-launch system could do with that small payload.

For small payloads, Falcon 9 with an economically-reusable first stage might be able to hit all those orbits quickly and more cheaply than Stratolaunch.

[Danderman]

Good luck putting payloads into a low inclination equatorial orbit at 500 km altitude with SpaceX.

[pippin]

Why would you want such an orbit?

[Sam Ho]

Why would you want such an orbit?

I can't say it's a very popular orbit, but ORS-5 is going to equatorial LEO. It's going up on a Minotaur out of Cape Canaveral.

http://spacenews.com/u-s-air-forces-ors-5-satellite-to-launch-on-minotaur-4/

[Gliderflyer]

Some cryptic pictures of the carrier aircraft have been uploaded to the Vulcan Aerospace website: http://aerospace.vulcan.com/stratolaunch The don't show much, but they have apparently started painting it.

[theebag]

Not sure if these were already posted somewhere else, but here's a peak in the hanger :







Source : http://aviationweek.com/blog/inside-rocs-lair

[Archibald]

Isn't the AvWeek article outdated ? they are still mentionning ATK three-stage solid-fuel booster with RL-10 upper stage. Wasn't that ruled out two years ago ?

[Ronsmytheiii]

Some cryptic pictures of the carrier aircraft have been uploaded to the Vulcan Aerospace website: http://aerospace.vulcan.com/stratolaunch The don't show much, but they have apparently started painting it.

I think this part is very telling:

With a twin-boom design, the aircraft is purpose-built as an air launch platform for space vehicles.  However, its considerable lift and volume capacity also make Stratolaunch uniquely suited for other applications.

I think Stratolaunch is going to be a very capable and unique aircraft just like the AN-225. But just like the latter, it will be lifting terrestrial cargo for the rest of its life.....

[Archibald]

I wonder if the Kabul airstrip is big enough for Roc ? An-124 and An-225 are doing it, so there might be some pressure on Roc there...

[yg1968]

Some updates:

Beames: can’t talk about Stratolaunch launch vehicle strategy now; “we’ll make quite a series of announcements over the coming year.”

https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/720736818216312832

Chuck Beames, Vulcan: Stratolaunch aircraft fabrication continues, making great progress; full launch service by end of decade.

https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/720716541143031808

[Robotbeat]

I will look forward to this awesome Albatross taking flight.

[yg1968]

Chuck Beames wrote a blog post with somewhat of an update:

http://aerospace.vulcan.com/News/A-Year-of-NextSpace.aspx

[yg1968]

Here is a recent article:

http://www.space.com/32680-stratolaunch-rocket-vulcan-aerospace-mystery.html

[Kabloona]

I will look forward to this awesome Albatross taking flight.

And speaking of seabirds, let's hope it fares better than the Spruce Goose.

[TrevorMonty]

It might be able to air launch one of XS1 proposals. This would allow for downrange recovery on land. Between, improved latitude, small DV gain from airlaunch and downrange recovery there would be a significant increase in payload.

Even one of small LV in development eg Firefly, Electron. Would be overkill but its a LV that doesn't need to be developed from scratch.