The Stratolaunch Roc, the world’s largest aircraft, is one step away from launching hypersonic vehicles

The largest aircraft in the world, the Stratolaunch Roc, is getting closer to starting to fulfill the purpose for which it was built. It is a aerial launch pad designed to deploy vehicles mid-flight, a capability that, As Northrop Grumman explains, one of the project partners, will serve as a supersonic test bed. In addition, it is hoped that in the future it will allow satellites to be put into orbit more cheaply.

Over the last few years, the world’s largest plane has been subjected to different tests. Last May, for example, the pylon debuted, the structure that will allow hypersonic vehicles to be loaded and launched, such as the Talon-A, which will travel at speeds greater than Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound) and at an altitude of 35,000 feet (10,668 meters). Last week, precisely, this structure was tested for the first time with the TA-0.

One year after starting to operate commercially

The TA-0 is a non-powered version of the Talon-A designed to test the pylon and all systems of the Stratolaunch Roc in a real world setting. the mother ship took off on October 28 from a runway located in the Mojave desert, in the United States, and completed a flight that lasted just over five hours and reached an altitude of 23,000 feet (7,000 meters). “We have built confidence that components will perform exactly as designed”, Stratolaunch said.

Between now and the end of the year, explains the company, they will make other test flights, including one that will operate the pylon release mechanism with a TA-0 vehicle over the Pacific Ocean. If all goes according to plan, the Stratolaunch Roc could start offering its services to government and commercial clients in 2023. We have to wait to find out how the projects of this company founded in 2011 by the co-founder of Microsoft, Paul Allen, and the founder of Scaled Composites, Burt Rutan, will evolve.

In relation to the mission of lowering costs to put satellites into orbit, there are many projects underway. SpaceX marked a before and after in launches thanks to its advances in recovery and reuse of rockets. Astra aims for daily rocket launches to democratize access to space. Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit uses a Boeing 747-400 to launch the LauncherOne satellite-carrying rocket. As we can see, the aerospace industry is more active than ever.

Images: stratolaunch

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