Why add a rocket to a fighter jet at all? Air Force, brand new F-15s, dubbed F-15EXs, are still rolling off the assembly line and straight into Uncle Sam’s hangars.į-15s have been chosen for plenty of other experimental efforts too, from launching hypersonic Phoenix missiles for NASA to literally shooting down a satellite, but as incredible (or even downright crazy) as many of these efforts may have been, they all pale in comparison to one 2006 Boeing proposal that aimed to mount a 45-foot-long, three stage rocket to the Eagle’s back. In fact, today, 46 years after entering service in the U.S.

Over the span of the past 50 years, the F-15 has proven so incredibly capable that it’s been considered by the Navy for duty aboard aircraft carriers, been modified to take off at speeds at low as 42 miles per hour, been landed by a student pilot after losing an entire wing, scored an air-to-air kill with a bomb, and even nearly got the stealth treatment complete with conformal weapons bays. With the same pair of Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-220 afterburning turbofan engines pumping out a bit more than a combined 58,000 pounds of thrust and new hard points and avionics to support a broad variety of conventional and even nuclear payloads, the Strike Eagle quickly followed in the Eagle’s footsteps, making a name for itself as an attack aircraft with such potent air-to-air capabilities that it had no need for a fighter escort. By 1986, just ten years after the first F-15s entered active service, flight testing began on the next iteration of the Eagle lineage the ground-attack oriented F-15E Strike Eagle. began exploring other uses for their powerful and acrobatic new airframe. With the immense success of the Eagle, it wasn’t long before the U.S. In fact, although Boeing’s Global Strike Eagle never made it past the proposal stage, their data seems to suggest that a rocket-packing Eagle could actually work.

Coyote might build than anything to come out of Boeing’s brain trust, but the official proposal offers a number of startling conclusions about the feasibility of such an effort. The idea and its accompanying designs may look more like something Wile E. But despite a very realistic approach to the Global Strike Eagle design, Boeing’s pitch likely still seemed a bit too crazy to put into practice… at least as far as we know. It was a relatively low-cost solution to a very expensive problem America’s military, particularly the Space Force, continues to tangle with today. Launching orbital payloads from an aircraft would eliminate the need for expensive rocket launch facilities while making it possible for F-15s to rapidly deploy small payloads into orbit from anywhere on the planet with an airstrip a hangar. The idea was to use the Eagle’s powerful afterburning turbofan engines and the incredible amount of lift offered by its design to ferry rockets up to high speeds and altitudes before releasing them to ignite and fly the remainder of the journey into orbit. This rocket-carrying fighter would be given the seemingly logical (while still entirely dramatic) moniker of F-15 Global Strike Eagle, and it could have revolutionized how America deployed hypersonic weapons or put small payloads into orbit.

Why did the F-15 Global Strike Eagle Not Happen? Why did Boeing develop the idea? In 2006, a team from Boeing proposed an incredible new use for America’s legendary F-15 Eagle that called for mounting a 45-foot rocket to its back.

Eagle strike