“Stratolaunch is developing an air-launch platform to contribute to high-speed research and development," a canned statement at the beginning of each current job offering says. “The goal of Stratolaunch is to use the air-launch platform for enabling technologies that may not exist otherwise."

Floyd also indicated a shift away from Stratolaunch's original focus of providing space launch services using the Roc, which first flew in April , as a mothership to air-launch various vehicles to using that aircraft to support more terrestrial high-speed flight testing. "VISION: Breaking Barriers. MISSION: To be the world’s leading provider of high-speed flight test services," he added in his Tweet.

"Stratolaunch grew from 13 to 87 employees over the past 2 months," Stratolaunch's CEO Floyd said in a Tweet on Dec. 10, 2019. "2020 will be a great year!"

GeekWire was first to report that Cerberus Capital Management had bought Stratolaunch from the late Paul Allen's Vulcan, Inc. holding company and that Stratolaunch President and CEO Jean Floyd had announced a new mission statement earlier in December 2019. Reports first emerged that Vulcan had sold Stratolaunch to an unnamed buyer in October. Vulcan, which had already been steadily scaling back the space launch firm's activities after Allen died, had first put it up for sale in June with a price tag of $400 million , including the Roc, a plane that cost at least $200 million to develop and build alone. Neither Vulcan nor Cerberus has said what the final agreed-upon price was.

New ownership has spared Stratolaunch , the company behind the massive Roc aircraft , the largest plane ever flown, from a sad end following the death of its founder, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, last year. The firm now looks set to take a new direction, providing high-speed flight testing services rather than focus on space launch services, amid a boom in hypersonic weapon and aircraft development within the U.S. military , which will likely become a major focus of the Roc's future activities.

Cerberus Capital Management Steve Feinberg's profile picture from the Cerberus website.

USAF A briefing slide from 2018 showing various efforts the Air Force was conducting at the time to improve hypersonic flight test capabilities.

Most recently, the U.S. Army laid out plans for a new three-part Hypersonic Test Engineering, Mission Planning and Systems concept, or HyTEMPS. This includes plans for a Portable Range Operations and Test Network (PROTN), a Broad Ocean Area Terminal Sensing System (BOATSS), and a Sky Range. PROTN envisages a single networked architecture to rapidly share telemetry and other test data, as well as handle communications between participants in particular tests, who might be hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. Since the open expanses of the Pacific Ocean have historically provided the best available space to conduct these kinds of flight tests, BOATSS will provide a distributed array of sensors on crewed ships, barges, and remotely operated vehicles in the air and at sea to gather information across a wide area.

USAF A briefing slide showing the typical array of air, sea, and ground bases sensors used to collect data during the two tests of the Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) in 2010 and 2011, respectively.