Stratolaunch, the six-year-old space venture backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, says it’ll use the world’s biggest airplane to launch small satellites into orbit – but what kind of satellites? The company’s executives have always said the Pentagon could be a payload customer, but when Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson visited Stratolaunch’s super-hangar at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California on Monday, it threw a spotlight on how important military contracts could be. The twin-fuselage Stratolaunch plane, nicknamed Roc, is designed to carry as much as 550,000 pounds of payload up to an altitude of about 30,000 feet… Read More