Space Firm Founded By Paul Allen Closing Operations, Report Says (reuters.com) 59
Stratolaunch Systems Corporation, the space company founded by late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is closing operations, cutting short ambitious plans to challenge traditional aerospace companies in a new "space race," Reuters reported Friday, citing four people familiar with the matter. From the report: The company, a unit of Allen's privately held investment vehicle Vulcan, had been developing a portfolio of launch vehicles including the world's largest airplane by wingspan to launch satellites and eventually humans into space. Allen, who founded Seattle-based Stratolaunch in 2011, died at age 65 last October. [...] Stratolaunch aimed to launch Northrop's small-payload Pegasus from Stratolaunch's carrier plane in 2020.
In this case, with the founder's death (Score:2)
challenge ... in a new "space race," (Score:2)
challenge traditional aerospace companies in a new "space race"
Oops -- so the traditional aerospace companies won.
Thanks for playing -- try again?
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Re: challenge ... in a new "space race," (Score:2)
I'd say companies like rocket lab and spaceX are winning.
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Uh, in the case of specifically Space X that appears wildly false. (Regardless of what happens to Tesla Space X is financially a completely different company.) Right now Space X appear to have a perfectly profitable launch business based on the Falcon X, which incidentally has basically driven the Russians out of the international commercial launch market for unmanned vehicles. Even if Starlink does not work out, at worse Space X would downscale to just the launch business where they should remain in good
Help us Musk (Score:2)
So Musk and Bezos are our only chance to get off this rock stuck in a gravity well. I am betting on Musk.
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So Musk and Bezos are our only chance to get off this rock stuck in a gravity well.
I always thought that Gerry Anderson would get us off this rock.
At least, he made space models that were cool, and blasted the Moon off to other areas in the universe.
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... and hire hot tech women to wear silver minidresses with short, knee high boots, and unnatural colored wigs. The man knew how to sell space exploration/exploitation...
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So Musk and Bezos are our only chance to get off this rock stuck in a gravity well. I am betting on Musk.
I hear Bezos offers free 2 day delivery to the ISS if you have Prime.
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Stratolaunch was never something to “get us off this rock.” It unfortunately became completely redundant after they abandoned their own rocket.
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There is also Richard Branson from Virgin Galactic, Burt Rutan is retired but his company Scaled Composite still exists.
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Some guys who worked down the hall from me in the early 1960s snagged a small government contract to analyze whether aircraft launch of satellites was feasible and practical. Their conclusion was sort of and no respectively. Of course technology has changed some in the intervening six decades. But it looks like they were probably right.
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But it looks like they were probably right.
I'm not sure if these [wikipedia.org] are launched on an orbital or merely ballistic trajectory but it certainly demonstrated the feasibility of the concept... decades ago.
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"orbital or merely ballistic trajectory" Neither? They look to be basically anti-aircraft weaponry operating in near Earth space. Sort of like a Patriot missile launched from a fighter aircraft and aimed at a satellite. Problem is that's kind of complicated way to do a simple job. Satellites have, at best, very limited mobility and their orbits are well known. Shooting them up from any sort of surface platform is presumably much easier than for example sinking aircraft carriers. Hyman Rickover told c
this rock (Score:2)
Air launch vs reusabiltiy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Air launch vs reusabiltiy (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, the designer also has to build a stack that can withstand being held horizontally through the stresses of the carrier aircraft takeoff and climb to altitude, and can handle forces acting on it in multiple directions, rather than a traditional stack where the majority of the force is transmitted vertically and in compression only. Then has to account for the whole drop the stack, rotate, ignite the engine sequence. By this point the traditional rocket has already passed flight level 400 and is traveling at a much higher velocity.
Airlaunch has some specific advantages, mostly when unusual orbits crossing specific points on the globe and hence unusual launch locations are needed, but that's not many missions. And the airlaunch rockets will be of limited size.
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Because of the rocket equation it seemed like even a small reusable altitude/speed boost would be useful, but Falcon 9 showed a huge one was possible without throwing anything away. Granted, they've only reused the same booster 3 times so far with a 4th planned but they're recovering 9/10 engines used for an F9 launch and 27/28 for the FH, once they keep the latter from tipping over at sea. Every part of that will be looked at for re-usability, whether it's just an inspection or refurbished or scavenged f
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The single largest advantage of air launch is engine efficiency. You want your exhaust gas to go as fast as possible but it must also maintain a pressure greater that of the atmosphere.
To expand on this point: SpaceX's Merlin engine [wikipedia.org] has an exhaust velocity of 2.77 km/s at sea level and 3.05 km/s in vacuum. At high altitude - for example, from an air launch - it'll be pretty close to the vacuum performance. And since this number, in the rocket equation, goes into the denominator of an exponential, it makes a *big* difference to the required size of the rocket.
To meet a funding target (Score:4, Insightful)
I figured that flight of the Stratolauncher aircraft after almost 2 years of no activity was carried out to meet a clause in an investment agreement (and thus avoid lawsuits for non-performance), and that sale or dissolution of the company would follow shortly thereafter. Not surprising.
The "Spruce Goose 2.0" (Score:2)
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...has Vulcan Ventures... actually had any products come to market?
So the answer's "No." You could have just said so.
Doomed from the start (Score:2)
I hate to say it but this specific concept was probably always a no go. There are fairly minimal advantages with "low speed" (less than mach 5) air-launch and a lot of disadvantages. You have to completely redesign your rocket for launching horizontally, have to cope with minimal "site" (the aircraft) support and with a severely limited rocket size. For all the trouble you get a small decrease in fuel usage and more flexible launch profiles.
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Probably you did not notice, but the summary mentions Stratolaunch aimed to launch Northrop's small-payload Pegasus, so they already had a customer, and if you dug deeper into it, you would realize the customer is a majour shareholder, too!
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They have been through several potential "customers" as you put it over the years and Northrup/Orbital was probably the worst of the lot. SpaceX, Northrup, Orbital and their own in house concepts were all tried at various times. Pegasus was probably the closest thing to flying on it and it is crazy expensive compared to most launchers today, even their cheapest launches run $40M. You can put up around as much with an Electron rocket at 1/6 the price.
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I hate to say it but this specific concept was probably always a no go.
It was too fucking complicated with too many things that could go wrong; they just weren't far enough along for that to even matter yet.
Indeed (Score:2)
"closing operations, cutting short ambitious plans to challenge traditional aerospace companies in a new "space race,"
Yeah, death can be hard on people's projects.
Inevitable, no? (Score:2)
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at least in the case of the space hobby, it is a form of wealth redistribution that gets significant amounts of money back into the hands of people who will spend it rather than hoard it in a bank account or in precious metals. Designing and building rockets and aircraft is a very labour intensive task. You have the Engineers and scientists that design it, the machinists who make the parts, and so forth.
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So let's do all kinds of busy-tech for the hell of it so engineers can do interesting, but ultimately useless work?
That would be the entire military industrial complex in a nutshell. Building machines the military literally says they don't want.
Isn't there a better use for the money?
Probably. We'll never know. Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup, and Raytheon are unassailable at this point.
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