NASA’s Super Guppy aircraft — the aeroplane that carries the space agency’s biggest loads — sits overnight at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for a well-deserved break. In fact, it had carried the fuselage of… another aircraft, due to be tested at the centre.
The Guppy had shipped a “representative test article of a futuristic hybrid wing body aircraft,” according to NASA. “The large test article, representing the uniquely shaped fuselage cross-section, is made out of a low-weight, damage-tolerant, stitched composite structural concept called Pultruded Rod Stitched Efficient Unitized Structure, or PRSEUS.” [NASA]