Stratolaunch's Talon-A Hypersonic Testbed to IOC in 2022? What is going on here?

Stratolaunch all but died when Paul Allen, its patron and investor, died. It was expected to completely shutdown and sell off what it could. However, a team of investors - some of which seem to have a dubious background based on comments here - came in and bought her out.

Prior to Allen's death, Stratolaunch had a grand vision of hypersonic and even orbital launch ambitions. One would have expected the company to be looted and sold bit by bit by the investors. However, that doesn't seem to be happening here. Quite the contrary! While there have been some scaling back of the publicly stated ambitions, it appears that Stratolaunch is going ahead with a hypersonic testbed to be launched from the Roc, their giant plane.

This makes little financial sense on the surface. The testbed will not be a money maker in the commercial world and the investors are not noted for being the starry eyed types like Allen, Musk and Bezos. They don't have, at least publicly, any grand visions for their own space programs. And, yet, here they are building the Talon-A. Not only are they building the Talon-A, they are claiming they will have IOC - initial operating capability - by 2022. In a mere two years.

There must be something more going on here. Do they have a government patron? That makes the most sense. Hypersonics is the new 'sex-say.' However, with all the other programs running around, even testbeds with similar flight characteristics...this is still odd.

So what is going on here?

Opine and speculate and navel gaze away.

www.janes.com...

a reply to: anzha

IMO.

Maybe they are seeing that Musk is going forward and actually sending astronauts into space and want a piece of that government pie.

It's all about the contracting dollars.

Sounds like a Space Force problem....

capable of conducting long duration flights at hypersonic speeds in excess of Mach 6
...
powered by an air breathing rocket engine

Color me skeptical.

a reply to: anzha

They're simply desparate to find anything to do for their pet aircraft and convinced someone at DARPA or AFRL to give them a small slice of ther hypersonic pie.
They were always looking at different second stage vehicles and Talon is just another iteration of those concepts.
Does it make sense? No, not really, but the recent hypersonic push is already well into devolving from acquiring key operational capabilities into the usual pork shuffling. So no surprise there.

yep, they can't kill it themselves....gotta let time have it....

in Seattle the money just flows....did ya know....for any sector....it seems to flow for free.....I was doing construction for Boeing at 9 locations up there...and I sorta worked with Paul.....Redmond forex twin bldgs

a reply to: mightmight