Stratolaunch has successfully completed a series of envelope expansion flights for Roc, the world’s largest flying aircraft, culminating in the achievement of a new operational altitude of 35,000ft.
Roc is Stratolaunch’s primary air-launch platform for the hypersonic testbed Talon-A it is developing. The flight test program occurred from mid-May to Mid-June, and as well as the new altitude ceiling a speed of Mach 0.63 was achieved.
All envelope expansion test objectives were completed to optimize future Talon-A mission operations in pursuit of sustained hypersonic flight.
The company completed its first successful powered flight of the Talon-A1 (TA-1) vehicle earlier this year on March 9, in which the TA-1 vehicle reached high supersonic speeds approaching Mach 5. By increasing Roc’s operational altitude, Talon-A will achieve higher speeds and extended time on condition.
Zachary Krevor, CEO of Stratolaunch said, “We learned a lot during our first flight of TA-1, and then quickly began progressing with our plans to increase Talon-A’s performance with various enhancements, such as increasing Roc’s operational altitude. Expanding Roc’s flight capability is critical to enabling Talon to go higher and faster”
In addition to expanding Roc’s flight abilities, the team took advantage of the flight series to train new team members on operational procedures and sustaining proficiency of the current team.
“Scaling our team and deepening their skills to meet future business needs is equally important to confirming our hardware achieves maximum performance. We’re working hard to build redundancy within the team so that we are soon able to perform concurrent launch operations between Roc and the Spirit of Mojave at any given time and location,” Krevor said.
The flight series also established an increase cadence of Roc flights in a set period of time, cycling approximately two weeks in between each flight.
“We know Roc and our team are ready to meet this demand, so it’s now a matter of testing and learning from our first TA-2 flights that we’ll complete later this year. This is an exciting time for our company and our customers as our routine hypersonic flight test service becomes reality,” Krevor said.
Parallel to the flight series, the company has also been preparing its first fully recoverable Talon-A vehicle, TA-2 for its maiden flight, anticipated to occur in the second half of 2024. The vehicle has cleared its initial vehicle testing, finished propulsion system installation and is currently wrapping up independent ground testing before it heads toward integrated ground tests with the Roc launch platform.
