With SpaceX out of the picture, Stratolaunch Systems is going to need a new logo (Credits: Stratolaunch).
On November 27, Stratolaunch CEO Gary Wentz broke the news: SpaceX is leaving the Stratolaunch partnership.
“Stratolaunch and SpaceX have amicably agreed to end our contractual relationship because the current launch vehicle design has departed significantly from the Falcon derivative vehicle envisioned by SpaceX and does not fit well with their long-term strategic business model,” Wentz told Flight International via email.
Stratolaunch Systems was rolled out in December 2011 by Paul Allen and Burt Ratan, former partners on SpaceShip One. The purpose of the new company was to develop an aircraft-launched space transportation system – similar to the SpaceShip/WhiteKnight concept, but on an orbital rather than suborbital level.
The launch system was to be composed of three main components, each provided by one of the corporate partners that composed Stratolaunch. A 116 wingspan carrier aircraft was to be designed by Scaled Composites. A multi-stage booster was to be developed by SpaceX, based on the Falcon 9 rocket. And a mating and integration system to interface the two was to be designed by Dynetics.
Since the formation of the partnership, the Stratolaunch launcher has undergone some design changes, including a chine extended along the wingroot to provide lift. The changes drifted far enough away from the original idea for a winged-Falcon 9, that it lost commonalities with that rocket. Development of the new design would have required changes to SpaceX’s manufacturing process and departed from the company’s objective of achieving cost effective spaceflight through simplicity and commonality of design.
SpaceX has been replaced in the Stratolaunch Partnership by Orbital Sciences, the company behind the air-launched Pegasus rocket first launched in 1990. Orbital Sciences is now trying to match SpaceX’s feat of providing commercial cargo supply runs to the International Space Station.
Below, the proposed Stratolaunch air-launch concept:
![A trajectory analysis that used a computational fluid dynamics approach to determine the likely position and velocity histories of the foam (Credits: NASA Ref [1] p61).](https://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/fluid-dynamics-trajectory-analysis-50x50.jpg)
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