The biggest aircraft ever built made its public debut this week as Paul Allen’s aerospace company rolled the twin-fuselage monster out of its desert hangar for the first time.
Mr Allen is co-founder of Microsoft, which he set up with his high school friend Bill Gates.
The Stratolaunch, unveiled on Wednesday, has a wingspan of about 120m (385ft), longer than the pitch at Wembley stadium, and stands 15m tall, roughly the height of a five-storey building. It has 28 wheels and six Boeing 747 jet engines. With a full cargo and fuel load it will weigh almost 600 tonnes, about the same as 500 Ford Fiestas.
Unlike the Spruce Goose, the enormous flying boat built in the 1940s by the tycoon Howard Hughes, it is not designed to carry passengers. Instead the Stratolaunch is intended to hoist satellites into a low-Earth orbit from high altitude more cost-effectively than firing them into space from the ground.
The idea is that the plane would take off and fly to about the cruising altitude of a commercial airliner before launching Pegasus XL rockets, developed by the aerospace company Orbital ATK to carry 500kg payloads into space.
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Stratolaunch Systems will carry out tests on the plane at Mojave Air and Space Port in California over the coming months. It is on track to perform its first launch demonstration in 2019, Jean Floyd, the company’s chief executive, said this week.