![]() ![]() But he never seriously imagined getting involved in rocketry, until he met Burt Rutan. (Gates, for the record, still seems a bit annoyed about that.) “It was unbelievably impressive,” Allen says now of that launch. In April 1981, during crunch time for Microsoft’s most important project-developing an operating system for the upcoming IBM personal computer-Allen up and left, joining a colleague on a field trip to Florida to see the first space shuttle launch. ![]() (The sale price: $75.) Using a blowup of an old photo of the room, Allen dispatched scouts to painstakingly re-create his boyhood library.Īllen never stopped thinking about space. He discovered that his mother had sold his collection. As Allen tells it in his memoir, he was crushed when he visited his parents as an adult and went to his old room to reference a book. “Way more.” One of Allen’s favorites was a popular science classic called Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel, by Willy Ley, first published in 1944. “Even when I first met him-he was in tenth grade and I was in eighth-he had read way more science fiction than anyone else,” says Gates, who later founded Microsoft with Allen. His childhood bedroom was filled with science fiction and space books. He dreamed of becoming an astronaut, but that ambition was scuttled by nearsightedness. Joe PuglieseĪs a teenager, Paul Allen was a sci-fi and rocketry nerd. But his goal is more practical: competing in the private space business. “When you see that giant plane, it’s a little nutty,” he says. Paul Allen, the billionaire funding Stratolaunch, has been fascinated with space travel since childhood. The plane, he and Allen said, would take its first flight in 2015. Rutan’s devilish grin said it all: This would be a plane to defy the imagination. For them to have any sense, they’d have to understand that even a Boeing 747 would seem like a Tinkertoy in comparison. ![]() ![]() The problem, he explained, was that no one in the room could possibly grasp how friggin’ big Stratolaunch would be. “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. He was the original architect of the outlandish endeavor and the person who had sold Allen on the project. Rutan, a gregarious designer of exotic aircraft, wore a light-blue work shirt and sported huge Elvis-style muttonchops. Allen’s hope was that this 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.īurt Rutan took the microphone next. The twin-fuselage, catamaran-style aircraft would be a flying launchpad, its purpose to heave a half-million-pound rocket ship to cruising altitude and then drop it, whereupon the rocket would ignite its engines for a fiery ascent into space. It would be the largest airplane, by wingspan, ever created. 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. On December 13, 2011, Paul Allen, the reclusive billionaire and cofounder of Microsoft, stood in front of a group of reporters in Seattle and told them about his wild new plan. ![]()
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