World’s Largest Plane ‘Stratolaunch’ Successfully Takes Flight

Stratolaunch flew for the first time becoming the largest plane by wingspan ever to take on the skies. The massive aircraft dreamed up by the late Paul Allen also has an in-built capacity to launch rockets into space while on air.

Stratolaunch successfully lifted from the Mojave Air and Space Port in the California desert on Saturday and stayed aloft for a couple of hours. The plane is a behemoth, with a twin fuselage, 28 wheels, six 747 jet engines and a wingspan, which is longer than a football field.

Stratolaunch is built by Scaled Composites, which is a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman. The plane was designed to carry as many as three rockets comfortably in its belly and has the capability to launch the rockets, which on instruction can drop, ignite and shoot off into space with their payloads. The company is thinking of introducing a human spaceflight and had preliminary plans to develop a mini space shuttle, called “Black Ice”.

Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft who died in October last year first dreamt of the plane and to use it to help getting items and possibly people into space in a more affordable and accessible way. He was fascinated with the capabilities of small satellites and thought of air launching rockets that could help usher in a new era of space flight.

He once said, “The capabilities of these small satellites is something that’s really interesting and fascinating. Both for communications, where a lot of people are putting up constellations of satellites and for monitoring the challenged health of the planet”.

The Pentagon had also shown its interest in Stratolaunch. Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson recently visited the plane, as also Vice President Mike Pence, who is also the head of the National Space Council.

The Stratolaunch is larger in size than the Howard Hughes’s Spruce Goose, which flew only for once in the year 1947.

Paul Allen, who was also a space enthusiast for much of his life, funded the development of the space plane. It also won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in the year 2004 by becoming the first non-government vehicle to pass the test to fly on space. He was however worried about the risks of human spaceflight then. But in 2011, he was back announcing his plans to build the world’s largest airplane, though he couldn’t live to see its success.