by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

MOJAVE, Calif. — Stratolaunch’s Roc — the world’s largest airplane by wing span at 385 ft (117.3 m) — flew for the fourth time on Thursday. In a sign of just how complicated the massive air-launch platform is to fly, one of the main objectives of this flight test was to retract and lower the plane’s landing gear at altitude for the first time ever.

MOJAVE, CA – December 8, 2021 – Stratolaunch, LLC is pleased to announce a research contract with the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). The company plans to augment existing Department of Defense flight test resources through affordable, commercially contracted, rapid-turnaround hypersonic flight testing for the Department of Defense and its prime contractor partners. “We’re excited to provide MDA with a threat-representative and threat-replicating target that allows them to understand how to […]

MOJAVE, Calif., November 1, 2021 (Stratolaunch PR) – Stratolaunch today announced that the Honorable Daniel Goldin, longest tenured National Aeronautics and Space Administration (“NASA”) Administrator, and Dr. Kamiar Karimi, former Senior Technical Fellow at the Boeing Company (“Boeing”), have joined its Board of Directors.

I found this video entertaining. I’m not sure this guy has any grasp of the technological challenges or how SpaceX and Virgin Galactic are trying to tackle it. He also calls a pair of routine pilot proficiency flights of WhiteKnightTwo at Spaceport America mysterious. Nothing really unusual about them. They conducted these flights at Mojave regularly. Hypersonic sounds great, but it’s not clear when or if it will carry passengers. […]

by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

Stratolaunch has unveiled a pair of hypersonic test bed vehicles and a reusable spacecraft the company plans to launch from its giant dual fuselage airplane.

“Talon-A is a fully reusable, autonomous, liquid rocket-powered Mach 6-class hypersonic vehicle with a length of 28 feet (8.5 m), wingspan of 11.3 feet (3.4 m), and a launch weight of approximately 6,000 pounds (2,722 Kg),” the company’s website said.

by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor

After 15 years of making extravagant but unkept promises to fly more than 600 “future astronauts” to space, Richard Branson must now please an entirely new group of people who are usually much shorter on patience: shareholders.

Following the completion last week of a merger with Social Capital Hedosophia (SCH), the British billionaire’s Virgin Galactic suborbital “space line” will begin trading under its own name on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Monday.

Going public now is an unusual move for a space tourism company that hasn’t flown a singlet tourist to space since Branson announced the SpaceShipTwo program in 2004. Some might see it has putting the cart before the horse.

Skylon spaceplane engine technology gets European funding
Flight International

A £6 million ($8.5 million) air-breathing rocket engine technology demonstration programme has been announced after the European Space Agency contributed €1 million ($1.25 million) to it.

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Pentagon envisions spaceship troops USA Today “The Pentagon wants to rocket troops through space to hot spots anywhere on the globe within two hours, and planners spent two days last month discussing how to do it, military documents show.” “Some critics are skeptical. The concept defies physics and the reality of what a small number of lightly armed troops could accomplish in enemy territory, said John Pike, a military analyst […]

X-51A Scramjet Engine Completes Ground Tests Aviation Week A year from now, over the Pacific Ocean off California in airspace cleared of all civilian traffic, hypersonics could take a step closer to reality. In the same skies where five years earlier the X-43A Hyper-X flew for 10 sec. at Mach 9.6, powered by a supersonic-combustion ramjet, the X-51A WaveRider is planned to fly on scramjet power for 5 min., accelerating […]

Mark Grollo races to space
The Herald Sun

Grollo Aerospace hopes to demonstrate a high-speed, high-altitude vehicle within five years. It plans to sell its technology overseas and hopes to eventually construct and operate space vehicles.

“We’d like to be at a stage where we are launching vehicles from Woomera,” Mark Grollo said. “But the ultimate goal is to have vehicles which take off from the standard runway and enter orbit. That’s the ultimate goal agencies all over the world are trying to achieve.”
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There’s more in Grollo Aerospace’s submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Economics.  The document that discusses the company’s work on an advanced wave rider technology.

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