On Tuesday night votes in Sierra County, New Mexico overwhelmingly approved a quarter-cent sales tax increase to help pay for Spaceport America. The vote was perceived as critical not so much for the money it would generate (only about $2.3 million over 20 years, barely one percent of the spaceport’s $198-million cost) as for clearing the way for the creation of a spaceport “tax district” with neighboring Doña Ana County, which passed a similar tax increase last year. According to state law, at least two municipalities needed to pass the tax for a district to be created, which could then collect and spend the money. Without Sierra County, there was no way to spend any money the more populous Doña Ana collected, which is why that county put off collection of the tax at the end of 2007.

The next step, then, is for Sierra and Doña Ana Counties to create such a tax district. That could be done in the next 60 days or so, although it probably won’t be ready by July 1, the next opportunity to put the tax increases into effect. (According to state law, sales tax increases can go into effect only on January 1 and July 1.) That makes it more likely the tax will kick in on January 1, 2009; any later would jeopardize work on the spaceport.

A third county, Otero, which includes the city of Alamogordo, is next in line to hold a tax referendum. County officials there said they would only hold an election if the tax passed in Sierra County; now that it has, that county is planning to put a smaller tax increase (one-eighth of a percent rather than one-quarter) on the general election ballot in November. Spaceport officials are hoping the tax passes, but said they would still be able to proceed even if Otero does not join the tax district.

As for the spaceport itself, the next major step is completing work needed to receive its FAA license. The major obstacle there is the completion of an environmental assessment, which is now projected to be wrapped up by the end of the year, a little later than previously planned (at the International Symposium on Personal Spaceflight last October, state officials planned to have the environmental assessment done by September.) The license from the FAA is needed before construction can begin.

Speaking of Armadillo’s John Carmack, in his team’s latest update, he provides his own unvarnished assessment of the various companies in the suborbital spaceflight sector. The Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic partnership “is the safest bet for success”, but cautions that Virgin may need the field to itself in order to make a profit on SpaceShipTwo: “If a more highly operable vehicle is competing, SS2 probably won’t ‘earn out’.”

Some other summarized assessments:

• Blue Origin: “It looks like they want to play in the orbital space, and perhaps don’t want to get bogged down competing in suborbital space. I think that is a mistake.”
• Rocketplane Global: “They have burned through tens of millions of dollars of funding, and nothing has ever left the ground. Would another ten or twenty million dollars do it? I doubt it very much.”
• SpaceDev: “I also think the hybrid powered VTHL DreamChaser is about the worst design for commercial suborbital flights. They aren’t going to build it on their own dime, and it looks like it would be a very expensive development project that would end up with quite high operating costs if it was ever completed.”
• XCOR: “I think they can probably do it” with Lynx.
• Astrium: “Oh, please.”

And his own assessment? “I still think there is a chance we might be first, depending on how Scaled chooses to play things.”

[Yup, still at the airport]

To follow up on a posting from during the Space Access ’08 conference, I have an article in this week’s issue of The Space Review examining what it will take to become a “rocket pilot”, and just how interesting an occupation that will be. As many of the speakers noted, there’s little to go on in terms of official guidance or experience in training for flying rocket-powered suborbital or orbital vehicles, so people are building up their flying credentials, gaining experience and certifications in various aircraft.

I also expand in the article John Carmack’s thoughts about how flying these vehicles will be relatively routine and even mundane, rather than glamorous. There will be interesting flying opportunities for those involved in test flights or even rocket racing, but regular commercial flights will be largely automated, so that the experience will be akin to that of an elevator operator. “[O]nce it gets to the point of lots and lots of people flying on these things—elevator,” he said at one point in the panel.

[Catching up on news items while waiting on a delayed flight]

An AP article last week reported that New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and spaceport authority executive director Steve Landeene made the rounds in Washington looking for additional federal support for Spaceport America. They met with, among others, NASA administrator Mike Griffin, who said he could not formally endorse the spaceport but “was crystal clear in his support for commercial space facilities,” according to Richardson. The two also met with Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, but not with FAA officials.

If the purpose of the trip was to win funding for the spaceport, the trip wasn’t an immediate success. Still, the trip won the support of the Las Cruces Sun-News which, in an editorial, congratulated the governor for his efforts in support of the spaceport. “Richardson is good at telling our story,” the paper argues. “His recent national attention as a presidential candidate probably helps him open more doors in Washington – except maybe Hillary Clinton’s Senate office.” The editorial also points out the trip comes just a couple of weeks before a spaceport tax referendum in Sierra County, similar to the one passed in Doña Ana County last year.

I was contacted by a reporter earlier this week looking for information about Sprague Astronautics, a company that made a splash a few years ago (under the name AeraSpaceTours) but has been quiet since. (Its last press release is dated June 28, 2005.) I haven’t heard anything about them for some time, and assume the company is either defunct or in deep dormancy, but would be curious to know more about what happened to it.

Also, I noticed earlier this week that the web site for Benson Space Company is down. If you go to the site you see this message: “This Website was developed by Rockets Away! Media a service brand of DoubleBill Productions, LLC.”; it then redirects to the Rockets Away! Media site without further explanation. Benson Space was active last year, including a new design for its suborbital vehicle at the ISDC in Dallas last May; there had been little in the way of updates since the summer, though.

A session of the Space Access ’08 conference last night dealt with “paths to rocket piloting”: how can people who are interested in piloting a number of the new suborbital vehicles under development prepare for getting those jobs. Some companies have turned to test pilots and/or former astronauts, but if this industry does grow, the pool of potential pilots will likely have to expand beyond that narrow niche. A number of the panelists, including several private pilots, talked about preparations such as acrobatic and high-performance aircraft flying that would have relevance to suborbital spacecraft.

A dissenting opinion came from John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace. He argued that the glamour associated by many with being a rocket-powered vehicle pilot will fall far short of reality. “I don’t think this is going to be an exciting career to go into,” he said, saying that the work involved with flying these vehicles is not like the “stick-and-rudder” work associated with conventional aircraft, especially for VTVL vehicles like Armadillo’s. “It’s going to be like being an elevator operator,” something that is just not that exciting. Armadillo’s suborbital vehicle design, the “six-pack” vehicle, does not even have a pilot on the vehicle: the vehicle is controlled from the ground; the single person on board does not any flight duties.

Last January Sweden announced plans to study the development of a commercial spaceport in Kiruna, a site in the northern part of the country home to a sounding rocket range, with Virgin Galactic as the potential first tenant. An announcement about the “next step” for Spaceport Sweden is now planned for Tuesday, April 1. According to the release, 26 “work packages” associated with studies for the spaceport have been completed in cooperation with Virgin Galactic, looking at issues ranging from accommodations to space operations. (SSC has also been involved with “Rymdstad Kiruna” (Kiruna Space City), an effort to increase the presence of the space industry in Kiruna.) The event, to be held in Kiruna, will cover both the path forward for Spaceport Sweden as well as provide an update on Virgin Galactic’s plans.

Here are a few items of interest I picked up from listening to the webcase of the XCOR press conference yesterday in LA:

• Lynx is designed to fly up to four times a day, which allows a single vehicle to carry as many passengers in a day as a larger vehicle (like a Rocketplane XP, which has room for three passengers, although SS2 could still carry more even if it flies just once a day)
• XCOR won’t give a specific ticket price, saying that decision will be up to the resellers and operators, but Jeff Greason said it should be possible for tickets to be half the price of the competition, which would work out to about $100,000, as the Wall Street Journal reported
• Initial flights of Lynx will be in Mojave, as expected, although XCOR expects that the Lynx will fly from many other locations, since it needs essentially no infrastructure than a runway and airspace
• XCOR hasn’t raised all the money needed to develop and build Lynx, but Greason is confident that the company will have no problem finding it
• Rick Searfoss, XCOR’s test pilot, said a rigorous, incremental test program that will start with simple runways hops and work its way through subsonic test flights and into the supersonic regime before doing full-up tests. He said he could “easily see” something on the order of 50 to 100 test flights. Greason later said that the test program “will be done when it’s done”, but said he would be “radically surprised” if it wasn’t something like a year or year and a half.
• Lynx will be powered by four engines similar to the existing XR-4K14 and XR-4K5 LOX/kerosene engines, generating roughly 2,700-3,000 lbs (12,000-13,300 N) of thrust each.

I’m heading off to Space Access ’08 in Phoenix today and will be posting there as events warrant from this evening through Saturday.

Some other items about XCOR’s new suborbital vehicle plans from media reports published this morning:

• According to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required), development of Lynx will cost abut $10 million with per-ticket prices of about $100,000, which the WSJ dubs “economy fare”, but adds that “the low-fare carrier to the heavens would hardly be cheap”.
• Part of that funding will come from a contract with the Air Force Research Laboratory, SPACE.com reports, which would provide up to $750,000 under an SBIR “to showcase the operationally responsive attributes of Lynx”.
• XCOR has spent $6-7 million on Lynx development, including the vehicle and “underlying technologies”, to date, according to the Bakersfield Californian.
  

Credit: Mike Massee/XCOR

XCOR Aerospace announced today its plans to develop Lynx, a suborbital rocketplane. Lynx is similar in concept to XCOR’s earlier suborbital vehicle project, Xerus: a two-seat winged vehicle that takes off from a runway under rocket power, ascends to altitude, and glides back for a runway landing. Lynx, described as “roughly the size of a small private airplane”, will begin flights in 2010 and be able to fly multiple flights per day. The initial press release did not disclose the vehicle’s development cost nor whether the company had all the funds in hand to develop Lynx, although XCOR in the past has tended to be conservative in this area.

A few notes from the release:

• XCOR is careful in saying that the Lynx will fly “to the edge of space”, but not in space itself: the flight profile shows it reaching a peak altitude of 61 km, well short of even the minimal 80 km “boundary” used by the US Government for awarding astronaut wings. Whether that will be an issue for customers—who will still experience weightlessness and get a broad view of the Earth below—is unclear.
• The press release plays up space tourism as a market, noting that the vehicle “will provide affordable front-seat rides to the edge of space for the millions of people who want to buy a ticket”, although it does mention research and education applications. The images suggest there will won’t be any room in the cockpit for the customer to float around in; keep in mind that Rocketplane Global, planning to develop a larger vehicle, doesn’t plan to allow its passengers to float around, at least initially.
• As a possible preemption of any criticism of the vehicle on environmental grounds, the company is noting that Lynx’s liquid-propellant engines will “minimize” the environmental impact of the flights. “They are fully reusable, burn cleanly, and release fewer particulates than solid fuel or hybrid rocket motors,” XCOR’s Jeff Greason said in the release.

More details will likely come out at a press conference in LA scheduled for 1 pm EDT today.