Microsoft co-founder unveils space travel plans

WASHINGTON — A giant airplane that can in mid-flight launch a rocket carrying cargo and humans into orbit is the future of space travel, billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen said on Tuesday.

The first test flight of the ambitious venture by Allen’s new company Stratolaunch Systems is not scheduled until 2015, but partners in the project vowed it would revolutionize orbital travel in the post-space shuttle era.

Using engines from six Boeing 747 jets, the biggest airliner ever built would tote a rocket made by SpaceX and be able to launch payloads, satellites, and someday humans into low-Earth orbit, Allen said.

While he declined to say how much he was investing, Allen said it would be more than he spent on SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 was the first commercial craft to complete a suborbital flight and reportedly cost about $25 million to develop.

“For the first time since John Glenn, America cannot fly its own astronauts into space,” Allen told reporters, referring to the US space shuttle’s retirement this year and the first man to orbit the Earth aboard Mercury 7 in 1962.

“Today we stand at the dawn of a radical change in the space launch industry,” Allen said, vowing greater flexibility than ground-based rocket launches and better cost effectiveness for cargo and manned missions to space.

“It will keep America at the forefront of space exploration and give tomorrow’s children something to search for in the night sky and dream about.”

Designs for the massive jet with a wingspan greater than a football field, a collaboration with aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan who designed SpaceShipOne, are at an advanced stage and a hangar is under construction in the Mojave desert.

“It is relatively close to building, as soon as we can get a building big enough,” said Rutan.