Free Republic

8:27 is the start of the action on a very interesting 33 minute long youTube episode. Paul Allen has created a database which, using AI, documents all youtube video of public figures - at all levels of government - such that you can go to https://citizenportal.ai and ask whatever you want to know about the position of whatever politician you are interested in. The AI transcribes whatever is said at any political meeting which gets to the interned (I forget if it’s only youTube sourced, don’t think so) - and uses the transcription as an index of what is said....

Stratolaunch said Friday that the company has “transitioned ownership” a year after the death of Paul Allen, the company’s billionaire founder who funded the construction of the world’s largest airplane for an airborne satellite launcher. The company offered few other details in a statement released to media Friday. It was the first official update on the status of Stratolaunch since its huge rocket carrier aircraft completed its first — and so far only — test flight in April. “Stratolaunch LLC has transitioned ownership and is continuing regular operations,” the company said in a statement. “Our near-term launch vehicle development strategy...

The space vehicle launch company owned by the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has confirmed that it's still operational, following a report that it was closing shop. Earlier Friday, Reuters said four sources told it that Stratolaunch Systems Corporation would be closing down. Stratolaunch has been developing a series of space launch vehicles including a super-sized aircraft. In August 2018, the company unveiled a lineup of vehicles. The Stratolaunch plane was designed to launch a Pegasus XL rocket, with the company also designing three other launch vehicles including a three-core rocket that would carry 15 times the Pegasus payload,...

[I]n the desert north of Los Angeles, a gigantic, six-engined megajet with the wingspan of an American football field flew Saturday morning for the first time. Stratolaunch Systems, the company founded in 2011 ... conducted the first test flight of the world's largest plane. Stratolaunch aircraft is a giant flying launch pad, designed to hurtle satellites into low Earth orbit. It aims to offer the military, private companies and even NASA itself a more economical way to get into space. The aircraft's wingspan measures 385 feet -- wider than any airplane on the planet. From tip to tail, it's 238...

The wreck of the World War II aircraft carrier USS Hornet has been discovered in the South Pacific, 77 years after Japanese forces sunk the ship in a fierce battle. The research vessel Petrel, owned by the estate of late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, discovered the Hornet three miles under the ocean surface off the Solomon Islands late last month. The Hornet, the last U.S. fleet carrier to be sunk by enemy fire, lost 140 hands under a relentless Japanese air bombing attack at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands on October 26, 1942. As Imperial Navy surface forces...

Allen, longtime CEO of Microsoft, also ranked among the world's wealthiest individuals. As of Monday afternoon, he ranked 21st on Forbes' list of billionaires with an estimated net worth of $20.3 billion.

Allen passed away Monday afternoon in Seattle at 65 years old, Vulcan said. His sister, Jody, said he was "a remarkable individual on every level." "While most knew Paul Allen as a technologist and philanthropist, for us he was a much-loved brother and uncle, and an exceptional friend. Paul's family and friends were blessed to experience his wit, warmth, his generosity and deep concern," she said in a statement. "For all the demands on his schedule, there was always time for family and friends. At this time of loss and grief for us – and so many others – we...

Seahawks owner hedging his bets like all corporate billionaires. But then you look at the state of Washington and see how whacko they've become with their homeless problem and the eat-the-rich solutions you can see why he wants the GOP to keep congress. Backlash to ensue. His response should be like Trumps: Double the donation.

Billionaire Seahawks owner and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen this year has made his largest-ever foray into congressional politics, donating $100,000 to a group aiming to keep Republicans in control of the U.S. House of Representatives. The June 14 donation, disclosed in mid-July, went to Protect the House, a committee headed by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. It’s the biggest check Allen has ever sent to a federal political candidate or committee, according to a review of Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings.

For years now, the Pentagon has been in the market for new heavy-lift launch vehicles – rockets that can lift between 44,000 to 110,000 pounds. Currently, the only market options available are either too costly or too reliant on Russian-made parts.To that end, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced that he will begin devoting most of his company’s efforts on developing the “BFR” – short for Big F-ing Rocket – which will allegedly be so huge and powerful that it will make the company’s previous rocket lines outdated in just a few short years. Musk stated at the South by Southwest...

An expedition in the South Pacific ocean funded by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen has discovered the wreckage of a famous US warship that was attacked by the Japanese during the second world war, claiming more than 600 lives. The billionaire’s personal search team located the remains of the USS Juneau off the coast of the Solomon Islands on St Patrick’s Day. The Juneau was sunk by Japanese torpedoes in November 1942, claiming the lives of 687 men, including five brothers known as the Sullivans from Waterloo, Iowa. The men became navy heroes and had a destroyer named after...

As news spread over the weekend about the discovery of USS Indianapolis (CA-35), the World War II cruiser lost in the war’s waning days, emotions of anyone associated with the ship ranged from joy, to relief, to consternation. Closure was brought to the few remaining survivors, and the families of crew members who survived or perished when the ship was torpedoed after completing its secret mission delivering to the Pacific island of Tinian the components of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Their friends and loved ones wouldn’t be recovered, but at least they had a sense of where their...

Six years after Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen started up Stratolaunch Systems, the billionaire’s air-launch venture brought its humongous twin-fuselage airplane out in the open for the first time today. “Stratolaunch came out of the hangar for fuel testing,” Allen said in a tweet that featured an aerial photo of the plane. More pictures were posted to Stratolaunch’s website. Stratolaunch CEO Jean Floyd said the plane’s emergence from its hangar at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port was part of a “major milestone in its journey toward providing convenient, reliable and routine access to low Earth orbit.” The plane is...

The bell from HMS Hood has been unveiled by the Princess Royal to mark the 75th anniversary of the Royal Navy's largest loss of life from a single vessel. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen - who funded the expedition to retrieve the bell from the seabed of the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland - attended the event at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard where the bell has gone on display. Anne struck eight bells at midday during the ceremony, held with HMS Victory as a backdrop, watched by descendants of some of the 1,415 sailors who died when the battleship was hit...

Billionaire Paul Allen has given millions of dollars to conservation causes over the years, including ones that support ocean exploration and preservation. But earlier this month, his 300-foot yacht Tatoosh allegedly caused significant damage to a protected coral reef in the Cayman Islands. The anchor and chain of the vessel allegedly damaged 14,000 square feet of reef on January 14, according to Cayman Islands' Department of Environment. The incident occurred in a protected area of Grand Cayman called the West Bay replenishment zone, which is near popular scuba diving sites. The M/V Tatoosh was "moored in a position explicitly directed...

A massive luxury yacht owned by Microsoft Corp co-founder Paul Allen destroyed most of a protected coral reef during a visit to the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean earlier this month, media reported. An anchor chain from the vessel damaged nearly 14,000 square feet (1,300 square meters), or about 80 percent, of reef near two scuba diving sites in the West Bay, the islands' environment department said, according to the Cayman News Service. Allen's Seattle-based Vulcan Inc organization, which manages his fortune, said on Wednesday that the M/V Tatoosh was moored on Jan. 14 in a "position explicitly directed" by...

The tycoons of cyberspace are looking to bankroll America's resurgence in outer space, reviving "Star Trek" dreams that first interested them in science. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen made the latest step Tuesday, unveiling plans for a new commercial spaceship that, instead of blasting off a launch pad, would be carried high into the atmosphere by the widest plane ever built before it fires its rockets. He joins Silicon Valley powerhouses Elon Musk of PayPal and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com Inc. in a new private space race that attempts to fill the gap left when the U.S. government ended the space...

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan are building the world’s biggest plane to help launch cargo and astronauts into space, in the latest of several ventures fueled by technology tycoons clamoring to write America’s next chapter in spaceflight. Their plans, unveiled Tuesday, call for a twin-fuselage aircraft with wings longer than a football field to carry a rocket high into the atmosphere and drop it, avoiding the need for a launch pad and the expense of additional rocket fuel. Allen, who teamed up with Rutan in 2004 to send the first privately financed, manned spacecraft into space,...

(Mojave, Calif.-AP, Oct 4, 2004 Updated 10:54 AM) _ A stubby rocket plane was slung from the belly of a carrier plane toward space Monday in the final leg of a trip toward the edge of the Earth's atmosphere and a $10 million prize. A new pilot and potential astronaut, Brian Binnie, was chosen to fly the second flight into space in six days for SpaceShipOne, the rocket plane funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen. The carrier plane took off from a desert runway and the plane was released in midair and fired its rocket to continue on its...

Billionaire Paul Allen has formed a new company to help make spaceflight more affordable and efficient. Vulcan Aerospace, which was unveiled Monday (April 13), will spearhead the space projects of Vulcan, Inc., a company Allen and his sister Jody formed in 1986. "Vulcan Aerospace is the company within Vulcan that plans and executes projects to shift how the world conceptualizes space travel through cost reduction and on‐demand access," Vulcan Aerospace president Chuck Beames and his colleague Kyu Hwang wrote in a paper describing the company that was presented at the 31 st Space Symposium in Colorado Springs this week. "Vulcan...