MEGA JET’S FIRST FLIGHT
The world's largest airplane – a Stratolaunch behemoth with two fuselages and six Boeing 747 engines – has made its first test flight in California
Why the mega jet?
The jet was built by engineering firm Scaled Composites and funded by Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates. It’s designed to carry into space, and drop, a rocket that would ignite to deploy satellites — a more flexible way than vertical takeoff rockets. It can drop packages at 35,000ft and has been billed by the firm as making satellite deployment as “easy as booking an airline flight”
What next?
The company intends to launch its first rockets from the Roc in 2020. Stratolaunch seeks to cash in on growing demand for vessels that can put satellites in orbit, competing in US with other space entrepreneurs like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and United Launch Alliance