France: The Aldebaran Project

France's space agency, Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) has a project in the works which may revolutionize the way satellites are launched. Instead of using a launching pad, they hope to make an 'aviation turducken' - a satellite, housed in a rocket, that is mounted to the undercarriage of a Rafale fighter jet. Check out this video, which depicts the proposed launching process (it gets interesting around the 1:56 mark).

While this is pretty forward thinking, the Chinese and Americans have similar projects underway as well. Understandably so, as coordinating a satellite - rocket launch currently takes up to six months or more. The prospect of launching a satellite from a jet could potentially reduce project schedules to days or maybe even hours. More importantly, this ensures that you can launch satellites critical to military operations even if your launching pads have been destroyed. The French rocket, the Aldebaran, however, takes it a step further than everyone else, as the Rafale jet would be able to launch these missions from aircraft carriers. Testing on the Aldebaran rocket is scheduled to begin in 2013.