Microsoft's co-founder Paul Allen revealed on Wednesday, May 21, 2017, the giant aircraft or the world's largest aircraft ever with the largest distance between its wings in history of aircraft industry per Popular Mechanics US magazine.
​The distance between wings of 385 feet - equivalent to 117 meters which is equivalent to the length of a football field - allows it carry six engines and makes it larger than the H-4 Hercules aircraft by Howard Hughes in 1947 and the Soviet Antonov A-225 which was originally built to carry the Russian space shuttle Buran (See photo below).
How Does It Work?​
The Stratolaunch aircraft weighs about 500,000 pounds without any load and is designed to carry a maximum of 1.3 million pounds on takeoff. With this huge size, it can be used as an airborne missile base, according to the British Daily Mail newspaper. The plane is moving on the ground with 28 wheels and take off by six Boeing 747 engines. The plane is designed to launch rockets into space from the air, saving jet fuel compared to the process of launching them from the ground and vastly reducing the cost of sending cargo into space.
Stratolaunche is unlike any other aircraft instead of loading the payload inside the body, it is to attach rockets to the center of the craft and then let them perform an airborne launch making ​the launch of satellite-bearing rockets more efficiently.