- The decision to set an exit strategy was made late last year by Allen’s sister, Jody Allen, chair of Vulcan Inc and trustee of the Paul G. Allen Trust, one of the four people and the fifth industry source said.
Jody Allen decided to let the carrier aircraft fly to honor her brother’s wishes and also to prove the vehicle and concept worked, one of the four people said.
Helistat flew once, too. Man, that thing is a fireball-in-waiting. You will not convince me they have everything wrung out on that thing. You will not convince me they have it wrung out to the point of clearing it for more than deathwish test pilots. Scaled Composites operates at a factor of safety of like, nuthin'. I think the winglets come off the Voyager at about 1:18. D00d Boeing is stacking corpses turning a 737 into a vaguely-better 737. I'm fully willing to believe that someone with a Youtube channel believes that you can launch a Pegasus from a carbon fiber toothpick at 30,000 feet on the reg. What I know is both Boeing and Airbus rolled their carbon fiber habits back 25 fuckin' years because testing it is a bitch and that thingamajobber is ALL the carbon. That's how Scaled rolls. They had one plane - and they had to shred all eleven they made. But wow, that freak of engineering flew.
Stratolaunch will do the airshow circuit to generate interest
I watched a video of a guy who went into the calculus level of can this thing do what it says it can. The answer is yes.
One case I see mentioned is to lob smaller NSA payloads that need to dodge tracking and are only good for brief time frames.
