Microsoft co-founder brings space flight company to Huntsville

SEATTLE, Wa.
Stratolaunch Systems, the new commercial space launch company announced today by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, will try to send its first rocket into space in 2016, company officials said today. The target for a first flight of the massive new airplane central to the company's vision is 2015.

Allen called his plan "the next great step" in space at a press conference in Seattle today. On the podium with him was Burt Rutan, whose company, Scaled Composites, will build the plane that will carry the rocket aloft for launch. Also on the podium was former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, who will sit on the Stratolaunch board of directors, and Gary Wentz, CEO of Stratolaunch and a former NASA manager.

According to the plan, Scaled Composites will construct a plane with a wingspan of  385 feet  (65 feet longer than the 320 feet wingspan of Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose). The plane will lift a cradled rocket built by SpaceX Technologies to an altitude where it can be released to boost itself into space. Aerospace engineering company Dynetics of Huntsville, Ala., will design and build the system to mate the rocket to the airplane and control the launch.

Rutan said the big plane "is not a sketch" but "exists in hundreds of detailed drawings. It is close to construction as soon as we get a building big enough." Site work has now begun in California's Mojave Desert on that hanger, Dynetics managers said after the press conference.

Allen and others in the company said the target market for the company's services will be commercial and government satellites formerly carried into space by the now idle Delta II rocket. Stratolaunch Systems will also be headquartered in Huntsville's Cummings Research Park near Dynetics.