THE world’s biggest plane is set to take off early next year in its groundbreaking first test flight.

    The aircraft, named the Stratolaunch Carrier, is currently under construction at Mojave Air and Spaceport in California, and will eventually have a wingspan of 385 feet (117 meters).

    It will be so huge that if the plane sat in the center of a football field, it would be wide enough for its wings to reach 12.5 feet beyond each goalpost.

    The craft is the brainchild of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Burt Rutan, founder of Scaled Composites — the same company blamed by Virgin for the SpaceShipTwo crash in October.

    Last week, Virgin said the flight breakup of SpaceShipTwo was down to: “Scaled Composite’s failure to consider and protect against human error and the co-pilot’s premature unlocking of the spaceship’s feather system.”

    But the tragedy — which killed one pilot, Michael Alsbury, and left his co-pilot Peter Seibold, suffering major injuries — has not slowed down work in the Mojave Desert, according to a report in Kern Golden Empire.

    The company said Tuesday that construction is going ahead as planned.

    When it’s complete, the Stratolaunch Carrier aircraft will be powered by six 747-class engines.

    Its 385 feet wingspan compares to 320 feet wingspan for the Hughes H-4 Hercules and 225 feet for the Boeing 747-8.

    The plane will climb to 30,000 feet and launch a rocket at high altitude, avoiding the huge fuel costs of launching from Earth, reaching space faster and at a lower cost than existing technologies.

    Initially, the system is intended to deliver satellites weighing up to about 13,500 pounds (6,124 kg) into orbits between 112 miles and 1,243 miles (180 km and 2000 km) above Earth.

    Instead of a satellite, the Stratolaunch airplane could also launch a Dream Chaser spaceship, which would be outfitted with an as-yet-unspecified upper-stage rocket motor.

    “Dream Chaser seemed to be the logical way to go,” Stratolaunch Executive Director Charles Beames said in October.

    “It could provide a highly responsive capability with the potential to reach a variety of LEO destinations and return astronauts or payloads to a U.S. runway within 24 hours,” Chuck Beames, president of Allen’s Vulcan Aerospace added.

    (SD-Agencies)