385 FEET OF ORZY

摘要

Paul Allen, the reclusive billionaire and cofounder of Microsoft, stood in front of agroup of reporters in Seattle and told them about his wild new plan. Wearing the tech-Brahmin uniform of navy blazer, dress shirt, and conspicuously absent tie, Allen made some introductory remarks and then rolled a video simulation of a strange beast of an aircraft leaving an oversize hangar. This was Stratolaunch. It would be the largest airplane, by wingspan, ever created. The twin-fuselage, catamaran-style aircraft would be a flying launch-pad, its purpose to heave a half-million-pound rocket ship to cruising altitude and thendrop it, whereupon the rocket would ignite its engines for afiery ascent into space. Allen's hope was thatthis extraordinary bird would be able to do quick laps between the ground and the stratosphere, making access to space no more exotic than a New York-to-Boston commuter flight.Burt Rutan took the microphone next. Rutan, a gregarious designer of exotic aircraft, wore a light-blue work shirt and sported huge Elvis-style muttonchops. He was the original architect of the outlandish endeavor and the person who had sold Allen on the proj ect. "Right here in front of us is a very large mistake," he said, landing heavily on the word mistake and jabbing his finger at a model of the plane. The problem, he explained, was that no one in the room could possibly grasp how friggin' big Stratolaunch would be. For them to have any sense, they'd have to understand that even a Boeing 747 would seem like a Tinkertoy in comparison. Rutan's devilish grin said it all: This would be a plane to defy the imagination. The plane, he and Allen said, would take its first flight in 2015.