Stratolaunch

One of the reasons I put up with reading Simberg's Flying Circus is that occasionally he'll report on something interesting about private space flight efforts. I'm interested in private space flight for a number of reasons, most of which boil down to the idea that if we're going to exploit space (as opposed to explore it) we will need radically lower costs to get to low-Earth orbit. The only way I see that happening is by competition, driven by cost, among multiple entities.

So Rand's big news yesterday was a news conference by Stratolaunch. This company, backed by $200 million from Paul Allen of Microsoft fame, is planning to build the world's largest aircraft, which will carry a modified SpaceX Falcon rocket to 30,000 feet. The carrier will then drop the rocket, which will climb to orbit, delivering 13,500 pounds of payload to orbit. Cost per launch was not provided, but presumably it would be significantly lower than current systems.

Current spaceflight technology is at roughly the same level as aviation technology circa 1910. The only way forward then and now is to try a bunch of different approaches and see what works and what doesn't.