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WASHINGTON – Stratolong, the company founded by late billionaire Paul Allen, said on January 18 that it was ending work on a launcher that would be flown by its giant plane.
In a statement to SpaceNews, a spokesman for the company said the company was stopping working on its own family of launchers and would instead use its planes to launch small Northrop Grumman's Pegasus XL rockets. The news of the change of plans was reported for the first time by GeekWire.
"Stratolaunch ends the development of their family of launchers and their rocket engine," the spokesman said in a statement. "We are streamlining our operations by focusing on aircraft and our ability to support a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL air launcher demonstration launch."
Stratolaunch did not mention layoffs in its statement, but sources close to the company said it was expected that several dozen people would lose their jobs after the completion of the company's vehicle development work.
Stratolaunch is best known for developing a giant aircraft that will be the largest in the world in scale. The double-fuselage aircraft, with six reactors, performed a series of taxi tests at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, most recently on January 9, when it reached a speed of almost 220 km / h. During this test, the nose gear of the aircraft briefly left the ground as part of a "rotational authority maneuver" suggesting that the aircraft was almost ready for its first flight.
"Surpbaded all expectations and achieved all test goals," said Jean Floyd, President and CEO of Stratolaunch, about this taxi test. in a tweet of January 11.
The company's plans for a launch system that would be airlifted have undergone several changes. When Allen announced Stratolaunch in late 2011, the initial design of the aircraft was to use a modified version of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket as a launch system.
Orbital Sciences (later Orbital ATK and now Northrop Grumman) replaced it with a vehicle called Thunderbolt with solid propellant lower stages and a top engine powered by an Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10 engine.
However, a few years later, Stratolaunch decided to end this effort, due to increased demand from smaller satellites requiring smaller vehicles. In October 2016, Stratolaunch announced a partnership with Orbital ATK, in which it would use the existing Pegasus XL rocket in the aircraft. One of the concepts presented by the company was to fly three Pegasus rockets at a time.
However, the company has not lost interest in larger launchers. The company hired a former NASA and SpaceX engineer as vice president of propulsion in mid-2017 and in September 2017 signed a Space Act agreement with NASA's Stennis Space Center for the use of aircraft. propulsion test facilities.
Stratolaunch officially announced its launcher development efforts only in August 2018, when it announced the development of what it called the average launcher, capable of placing up to 3,400 kilograms in low Earth orbit with a first launch in 2022. The company also said to have concepts for a larger vehicle, able to place 6,000 kilograms in LEO, as well as a reusable crewed space plane.
These vehicles would be powered by a motor that the company was developing, called PGA, which takes its name from the initials of the founder Paul G. Allen. The engine, using liquid oxygen and liquid propellants, was designed to produce a thrust of up to 200,000 pounds. In November, Stratolaunch claimed to have successfully tested the pre-burner, the smaller of the two combustion chambers of the staged combustion engine.
However, Allen's death in October of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma raised questions about the future of Stratolaunch, which was in fact fully funded by him. Allen's holding company, Vulcan Inc., said at the time that Allen had made plans before his death to continue his various activities, but had not revealed them.
With this announcement, Stratolaunch will depend on the Pegasus XL, a vehicle with a long reputation, but little demand given its high prices. The company argued that being able to fly three Pegasus vehicles in a single flight would allow it to deploy a constellation of satellites in different orbital planes, the aircraft being able to change course as needed. However, this flexibility may not be sufficient, given the emergence of a new generation of small commercially developed launchers at much lower prices.
In its statement, Stratolaunch repeated that it would continue testing its aircraft. "We are immensely proud of what we have accomplished and look forward to our first flight in 2019," said the company spokesman.
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