With His Death, Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch May Go The Way of The Spruce Goose

February 4, 2019 – Howard Hughes, the reclusive billionaire, and Hollywood movie mogul, was an airplane aficionado. The Spruce Goose, the largest aircraft ever built until Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch, was entirely made of wood and touted a wingspan longer than an American football field. In 1946 he built the H-4, a flying boat that at the time cost $23 million. It flew for the first time in November of 1947 and then disappeared from the public view just like its inventor, Hughes. Today it remains housed in a climate-controlled hanger in Oregon, a tourist attraction, and a historical artifact.

Another wealthy eccentric, Paul Allen, appears to have followed in the footsteps of Howard Hughes. Allen created Stratolaunch Systems and its rocket-carrying aircraft, named the Roc after almost a decade of development. Scheduled for flight certification by 2020, the Roc today sits in limbo in a hanger, having never flown. The Spruce Goose did one better. All the Roc has done is taxi down a runway and return to its nest.

The problem stems from Paul Allen’s will. The billionaire funded all kinds of projects and left all of his assets in a living trust for the benefit of his sister and her offspring. There was nary a mention of Stratolaunch. The result is the nascent rocket launching company has laid off 75% of its staff and has only 20 employees remaining to look after an aircraft that may remain in a hanger forever, a failure to launch story if there ever was one.

I’ve written about Stratolaunch in the past, and how this behemoth of an aircraft was to be used to launch rockets carrying payloads into low-Earth orbit. Allen had plans for a reusable space plane that would ride beneath the aircraft to be released at high altitude and climb to orbit. The company was working with Northrop Grumman on becoming a launch platform for its Pegasus XL low-payload to orbit rockets. But unless Northrop buys the Roc and Stratolaunch, it is unlikely that this aircraft, bigger than The Spruce Goose, will ever soar into the skies.