Stratolaunch Preparing for Flight with Hypersonic Test Vehicle
It appears that Stratolaunch will fly the Roc aircraft with its structurally complete Talon-A hypersonic test vehicle, TA-0, attached for the first time this week. There are NOTAMs indicating the closure of the Mojave Air and Space Port’s Runway 12-30 on Monday and Tuesday.
My best guess is Stratolaunch will conduct a captive carry flight to test how the giant twin fuselage aircraft handles with a payload attached under its central wing. It’s possible they could conduct a drop test of TA-0, but the flight test program has been conservative thus far.
Talon-A is designed to advance hypersonic flight, which involves speeds of Mach 5 and above.
7 responses to “Stratolaunch Preparing for Flight with Hypersonic Test Vehicle”
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I really hope this test article has some kind of path to application for passenger aviation, and isn’t just about missiles.
The US is behind both Russia and China in developing hypersonic long range weapons so i hope its about missiles, personally…
A civilian application can be turned to military purposes a lot easier than vice-versa, so it would behoove us to focus on the former.
Military applications have been turned into civilian applications more times in history that the reverse.
I doubt it, but the point is it’s more strategically advantageous to have something as part of the economy rather than a handful of bespoke technologies optimized for obscure military departments. That’s the logic behind having a merchant marine; interstate highways; the internet; civil aviation and commercial spaceflight. It’s a conspicuous failure that supersonic aircraft weren’t successfully adapted to civil aviation, and that fact has for sure hampered their progress in the military sphere. Identical logic applies to hypersonics, and this time it should be planned from the start to have civil applications to avoid that.
The problem is that the benefits of the reduce travel time will only exceed the costs on a handful of routes. The other problem is the potential damage to the upper atmosphere which was the reason U.S. stopped development of a SST airliner.
Atmospheric damage is definitely an issue to explore, and it might be the deciding factor favoring suborbital point-to-point launches over air-breathing hypersonics.
We don’t really know the cost-benefit math for hypersonic transport, only for supersonics, which are nowhere as radical an increase in capability over subsonic alternatives. It is definitely not cheaper to fly 300 miles than to drive it, but people do it all the time because of convenience. Even the collapse of supersonic civil aviation was only a qualified failure. It was definitely not the reason Boeing walked away from its long-planned supersonic airliner, but rather the infamous degeneration of the company itself into technological paralysis.
Only a deeply-funded, founder-controlled, first-principles-based supersonic airliner venture would be able to answer that question definitively.