Radia WindRunner’s Next Cargo Will be Fully Assembled Rockets

Radia just handed its giant cargo plane a second job. WindRunner started as a flying warehouse for 105-meter wind turbine blades that no highway, rail line, or existing freighter can take in one piece. On September 9 the Boulder company said that same 356-foot airframe can carry fully assembled rockets, boosters, and oversized satellites, and it will argue the case next week at the Air and Space Forces Association conference in National Harbor, Maryland.

WindRunner is a huge aircraft, reaching 356 feet from nose to tail, 261 feet across the wings, and 79 feet at the top. The useful cargo volume is 240,000 cubic feet, which is nearly ten times the capacity of a Boeing 777 freighter and several times that of an Antonov An-124. At full stretch, the cargo can measure up to 344 feet long, 33 feet wide, and little under 30 feet tall. It has a weight limit of 160,000 pounds, which is reasonable, but its design prioritizes volume.

According to Mark Lundstrom, Radia’s founder and CEO, when launch vehicles and other vehicles grow in size, the trucks, ships, and planes that transport them become increasingly obsolete. Windrunner, he claimed, can load a whole booster or a reusable space ship in hours rather than days, and it remains intact; no need to disassemble it to move from A to B.

The trick to all this is roll-on, roll-off loading, courtesy of a nose entrance and a low cargo deck that enables personnel just drive or slide a launch vehicle straight in. Radia claims the bay can accommodate launch devices that are nearly twice as large as anything currently available on a cargo jet. They claim that because the entire thing remains in one piece, they can avoid the traditional hassles of disassembling, crating, and reassembling the hardware at the other end.

Short dirt strips are actually a blessing in disguise for WindRunner because it only requires around 6,000 feet of unpaved or semi-prepared runway to land and take off, eliminating the need for any expensive ground gear. Its top speed is approximately Mach 0.6, and it can climb to 41,000 feet. Even when fully loaded, the range is rather acceptable at 1,200 miles. Power will come from four in-production turbofans with 55,000 pounds of thrust apiece, a light aluminum fuselage, and a largely composite wing.

Space operators could employ WindRunner for more than just transporting equipment to and from the launchpad. For example, they can use it to transfer reusable first stages back to the pad without having to disassemble them. Then they could connect the rest of the system remotely and fly the finished product to the shore or inland from there. That’s got to be worth something, because national security, communications, Earth observation, and ISR satellites that are currently trimmed down to fit on a C-17 or a ship hold might remain intact. Radia is advertising this as a flexible transport service; consider it a means to move large, problematic parts to a launch site or to transfer a satellite all the way to the coast and back in one trip. They say it’s a useful addition to the existing airlift rather than a replacement.

Right now, everything is simply on paper. WindRunner now exists as drawings, renders, and a growing supplier list, including Aciturri on the tail, Akaer on the cabin and systems integration, Astronautics on the avionics, and so on. Radia has also entered into a research arrangement with the United States Transportation Command to accelerate development. The first flight is scheduled at the end of this decade, with service beginning in the early 2030s.
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