Paul Allen and Burt Rutan Creating Civilian Spacecraft and Massive Stratolaunch Aircraft – Worlds Largest Aircraft

Stratolaunch Aircraft will be world's largest aircraft.

With funding from billionaires Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, and Sir Richard Branson founder of Virgin Airways and Virgin Records, Burt Rutan and his team won the $10 million Ansari X Prize in 2004.

The competition was to create and fly a manned rocket on a sub-orbital flight into space, return safely and repeat the process. Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites, won the competition with their SpaceShipOne spacecraft.

Since that time, Branson has created Virgin Galactic which aims to use a larger version of the space ship to make space tourism a reality, and has even broken ground on the worlds first civilian space port in the Mojave Desert, known as the Mojave Air and Space Port.

Currently, Paul Allen and Rutan are in the process of constructing the world’s largest aircraft which is designed to carry a rocket up to 30,000 feet for its launch into orbit. Getting the payload off of the ground and up to altitude saves a lot of fuel, energy and expense which is wasted with traditional rocket launches in the first moments of lift-off from the ground.

Allen has created a new company, Stratolaunch Systems, based in Huntsville, Alabama. The company is set to oversee the completion of the aircraft design and development.

According to Allen, who has given money to a number of charitable and scientific projects including SETI, he said during a press conference that he had dreamed of being an astronaut as a child and that his “fascination with space never ended.”

“Today we stand at the dawn of a radical change in the space launch industry,” Allen said. “We have many challenges ahead of us, but by the end of the decade Stratolaunch will be putting spacecraft into orbit. It will keep America at the forefront of space exploration.”

With a target date for the first flight in the next 5 years, the massive aircraft will make use of six engines which are used on Boeing 747 aircraft. The aircraft will have a 385 foot wingspan and weight over 1.2 million pounds.

Much like Rutan’s earlier aircraft design which carried SpaceShipOne aloft, the massive heavy lift aircraft has a tandem fuselage design with the rocket carried in the middle.

According to reports, the multistage booster rocket will be manufactured by California-based Space Exploration Technologies, known as SpaceX, who recently received tentative approval by NASA to make the first commercial flight of a spacecraft, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, to rendezvous with the International Space Station. The company is headed in part by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk.

Construstion of the aircraft will take place in the Stratolaunch hangar at the Mojave Air and Space Port. Meanwhile the mating and integration system will be manufactured in Huntsville by aerospace engineering firm Dynetics.