"Allen's rocket will be launched from a massive carrier
aircraft powered by six jumbo jet engines, to be
constructed by Scaled Composites, a unit of defense
contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. The rocket itself
will be made by private space company SpaceX,
founded by Elon Musk, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal."
He is a billionaire these days. He owns 1/3 of Tesla, which has a market cap of $3 billion. His ownership stake in SpaceX is also without a doubt worth a nice chunk of change.
Not a clone of SpaceShipOne, a new carrier aircraft that is a derivative of White Knight / White Knight 2 and a new rocket that is a close relative of the Falcon 9. The "special" part is that nobody has done that before, and it may prove to be a worthwhile endeavor.
Do you really gain much from a carrier plane if you want to reach orbital velocity? LEO velocity being ~18,000mph, and any realistic carrier plane going much slower than that.
Can't save that much on the orbital velocities. The main takeaway is the capability to launch on-demand, from different locations. In which case it suddenly becomes a logistical challenge : i.e how do i prep the system to launch X rockets with short turnaround.
Bear in mind that the payload is limited by what the carrier aircraft can hold. Either use an existing plane and retrofit like what Orbital does , or build an entirely new plane.
There's a bunch of heavily funded startups trying to launch small payloads into orbit, which is always interesting to watch.
