Out of all the space startups in the last decade, few had a better foundation than Seattle-based Stratolaunch. Backed by the billions of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and incorporating the engineering genius of X-Prize winner Burt Rutan, the company seemed to be in the top tier of an industry that’s been growing almost as fast as its main product takes to the skies. But on Friday, Reuters reported that the company which in the process of getting to space built the largest plane ever to fly … isn’t going to space. And that plane may never fly again.
To reach space, Stratolaunch developed an ambitious program that took advantage of Rutan’s skills at designing aircraft. Just as with the prize-winning SpaceShipOne, the company would carry its orbital craft aloft using a plane, giving its rockets an altitude and speed boost and supposedly reducing costs in the process. At first Stratolaunch tried to work with the then fledgling SpaceX, whose first Falcon 9 flight was still a year away, but that relationship fell apart as the two companies had differing goals and timelines. Stratolaunch went on to design and test its own engine, the PGA (Allen’s initials), and by the summer of 2018 it was ready to introduce a whole family of upcoming launch vehicles, including its own space plane. At the same time, it moved aggressively to build its namesake aircraft, a giant carrier vehicle with six jet engines and a record-setting wingspan. Plans called for the launch of the first “medium” booster in 2020.
But that was August. In October of 2018, Paul Allen died, and almost immediately it became clear that Stratolaunch had been powered by his vision; a vision those left in control of his wealth did not share. In January of 2019, Stratolaunch didn’t just scale back their proposed family of boosters, they scrapped them all. No space plane. No medium boosters. No PGA booster. Instead, the company declared that the giant plane would be used to launch the much smaller Pegasus XL rocket—a rocket that can already be launched from much more conventional aircraft, but whose high cost had resulted in almost no demand. It sounded then like a end to Stratolaunch as a spaceflight company. And as it turns out, that was exactly the case.
On a clear morning in April, Stratolaunch rolled out their giant aircraft and made a test flight over the Mojave. It now appears that the giant plane may never fly again.
Allen was with Microsoft before it was Microsoft. In fact, he came up with the name while working with Bill Gates to develop and market the company’s first BASIC programming language system in 1975. And it was Allen who scrambled through the first years of the company to buy, beg, code, and cobble together the system that became DOS—the operating system that would soon dominate the first big generation of PCs. In 1982, he left the company after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but he survived his treatment and, to his own frequently expressed surprise, his position as one of Microsoft’s founders made him one of the world’s wealthiest individuals.
Allen liked to use that wealth. He bought the Portland Trailblazers. He bought the Seattle Seahawks. However, his spending was far from completely frivolous. He also opened the Allen Institute for the study of Brain Science. And another institute for Cell Science. And one for artificial intelligence. He gave over $2 billion to fund environmental conservation, education, community projects, and local arts institutions. But despite all that, he had one unrequited dream.
"I dreamed of becoming an astronaut," he said when Stratolaunch was announced, though poor eyesight had doomed his chances of having that happen through the NASA route.
Stratolaunch was Allen’s second chance at that dream. But it seems to have died along with him when he was died at the age of 65 while fighting a second round of lymphoma.
According to the Reuters report, Paul Allen’s sister Jody Allen “decided to let the carrier aircraft fly to honor her brother’s wishes and also to prove the vehicle and concept worked.” But that seems to be the last gesture being made at Stratolaunch. Most employees have already left and numerous sources stated that the company is “closing operations.”
Allens’ efforts, and his gigantic plane, seem destined to be a footnote in the development of commercial spaceflight. At the time of his death, Allen left behind a fortune estimated at $21 billion. The fate of the institutes he founded is unclear.