Stratolaunch on Wednesday announced it had received a research contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory.
Terms of the contract between Stratolaunch, in Mojave, and the research lab, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, were not disclosed.
The aerospace company is partnering with Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., the McLean, Virginia, consulting firm, to assess the feasibility of hypersonic flight tests of a wide range of Air Force experiments and payloads on a frequent and routine basis, according to a news release from the company.
Daniel Millman, chief technology officer with Stratolaunch, said the company’s goal is to provide affordable and routine access to the hypersonic flight environment.
“We look forward to sharing lessons learned from this collaboration with AFRL, yielding powerful and practical research results benefiting the nation,” Millman said in a statement.
The Stratolaunch team has been building its first two Talon-A test vehicles – the TA-0 and TA-1.
The Talon-A is a vehicle that is a rocket-propelled, autonomous, reusable testbed carrying customizable payloads at speeds above Mach 5. It is launched from the Roc carrier aircraft, the largest airplane in the world with a wingspan of 385 feet. Northrop Grumman Corp.’s subsidiary Scaled Composites built the craft at the Stratolaunch hangar in Mojave.
Founded in 2011 by the late billionaire Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft Corp., Stratolaunch was sold by Allen’s investment firm Vulcan Inc. about a year after Allen died in 2018. The new owner was identified in media reports as Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm specializing in distressed companies.