The take-off weight, indicated in some sources, was 1,650 tones (3.6 million lb), which is over three times more than the Scaled Composites Stratolaunch. 700 tones (1.5 million lb) of those was the weight of the OOS spaceplane carried under the mid-section of the wing. Eighteen D-18T turbofans with a combined thrust of 421,740 kgf would have been dotted around plane’s wings, with an option to employ larger power plants if those become available. Just one of many proposed Soviet aerospace systems at the time, it was barely anything more than a possible solution to a problem of getting the OOS to the required altitude.ĭespite the early termination stage and a lot of uncertainty, we can – and should – admire the audacity of engineers. The AKS, an acronym for “aerospace system”, was a placeholder name for this crazy project that never went into the stage where it would acquire a name of its own. Strapping two Mriyas together seemed like a natural solution to such a problem. To reach that stratosphere, it would need a mothership of yet-unheard proportions, with roughly twice the size and the capacity of the An-225. Similar in size to the Space Shuttle and Buran, but with a smaller payload of 10 tonnes, it would carry its own rocket engines and fuel supply from the stratosphere-up. So, Tupolev design bureau proposed an upgrade – a single-stage orbital airplane (OOS). Yet another spaceplane was designed to perform aerial launch from its back under the MAKS program, but it was too small to be practical for delivering cargo to orbit. The Antonov An-225 Mriya was an enlarged, upgraded An-124 Ruslan, adapted to carry Buran space shuttle. It had its fair share of craziness, but pales in comparison with what happened in the Soviet Union just a decade later. That project was deemed impractical and got discontinued later in the 70s. It considered modifying one of large, but accessible planes – the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, the Lockheed C-5 Galaxy and the Boeing 747 were primary candidates – to have two fuselages, with a predecessor of the Space Shuttle carried under a mid-section of the wing. That was the premise behind Conroy Virtus, a NASA program started in 1973. Coupled with a reusable space vehicle – such as a spaceplane – it could make the cost of spaceflight incredibly cheap. As such, twin airplanes were a perfect platform for aerial launch of space vehicles – an idea that would allow avoiding inefficient disposable rocket boosters, would not need expensive ground infrastructure, and would make launch schedules a lot more flexible. TheWWII era saw a boom in the popularity of the design and even some successful, mass-produced examples such as the Heinkel He 111Z and the North American F-82 Twin Mustang.įor transport planes, it was a way to increase an aircraft payload without a dramatic increase in cost and complexity. The basic idea of joining two regular fuselages together goes back to WWI. When the Scaled Composites Stratolaunch took off to the skies, some aviation enthusiasts all around the world thought to themselves: hey I’ve seen this before.ĭepending on the location of the said enthusiasts, they may have been reminded of numerous different projects to make a giant twin-fuselage aircraft and to launch spacecraft with them.
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