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Stratolaunch, the aerospace company founded by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, flew its giant carrier plane named “ Roc ” for the second time on Thursday. It was the company’s first flight under a new owner, coming two years after the initial flight test of the twin-fuselage craft.
“Today’s flight, at first glance, seemed extremely successful,” Stratolaunch chief operating officer Zachary Krevor told reporters on Thursday. “We performed all the test points as desired, we did not see anything abnormal and we are very satisfied with the condition of the aircraft on landing.”
Roc’s wheels were up at 10:30 a.m. ET, and the plane reached a maximum altitude of 2.6 miles over California’s Mojave Desert, Stratolaunch wrote in a press release. The six-engine-powered flight lasted three hours and 14 minutes before Roc touched down on a massive runway at Mojave Air and Space Port. The flight lasted longer than its first outing in 2019, but the craft flew slightly lower. One side of the plane landed just before the other.
“The aircrew did a great job lowering the aircraft according to our planned crosswind procedures,” Krevor said. Roc’s test flight was designed to see how the aircraft handles cabin pressurization, test safety features and some new hardware upgrades since its last test flight.
The wingspan of the carrier plane is 385 feet, nearly twice the width of a Boeing 747, making it the world’s largest plane in wingspan. It is designed for possibly transport Stratolaunch’s fully reusable and autonomous Talon-A hypersonic vehicle – a rocket-propelled jet-shaped craft measuring 28 feet long and 14 feet wide that is designed to serve as a hypersonic test bed for the Department of Defense .
Once deployed, the Talon A will ignite its liquid-fueled rocket engine to propel itself higher into Earth’s atmosphere for approximately one minute of hypersonic flight test conditions. It slides back for an autonomous landing on a conventional runway.
However, no Talon-A was on board the Roc for Thursday’s test flight. The company’s chief technology officer, Daniel Millman, told reporters Roc will rise faster and faster on test flights over the next year until he can prove that it is capable of achieving the good flight conditions required to drop Talon-A. “It will happen later in the year,” Millman said.
Stratolaunch downsized operations, laid off most of its employees, and ended plans for a fleet of air-launched rockets after the death of billionaire founder Paul Allen in October 2018. The company kept enough employees on board to handle the carrier plane’s first flight, which occurred in April 2019. Stratolaunch went dark for over a year after that. It finally found new funding and rehired some employees to relaunch its carrier aircraft test program and refocus its activities on hypersonic testing.
Today’s flight of Roc, named after the great and legendary bird of prey from Middle Eastern mythology, was the culmination of this revival.
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