a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by kleinbl00

Mmmm....I dunno, man. The Spruce Goose never did any proof-of-concept troop hauling. It got up off the water, made some scary creaking noises and never left ground effect.

Power-to-weight, the thing is a 747-800. Size-wise, the thing is a 747-800 and a half. But there, where most planes have a fuselage, Stratolaunch has a stress concentrator. And it's carbon. Which means nondestructive testing is super-duper tricky and any delamination and it's done.

Rutan's a clever guy. But if you recall, the last big scary cargo beastie he built scraped its winglets off on takeoff and the closest he's ever gotten to a production aircraft is the Beechcraft Starship.

...and he retired in 2011 so this is his posse, not him.





WanderingEng  ·  2491 days ago  ·  link  ·  

All points more valid that my idle speculation. My thought is anyone who has enough money to build this but never use it has enough money to fire a rocket or two into orbit.

And maybe the sci-fi geek in me is just secretly hoping they do.

kleinbl00  ·  2491 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see 'em use it.

But I would turn down a ride on it.