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.

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.

Flightglobal.com, in a feature article about Virgin Galactic turns up one mildly surprising point: the company, while still in the development stage, is profitable, if only by a modest amount. The article notes that in the company’s first publicly available financial reports since it was formally incorporated in the UK in mid-2006, the company had an after-tax profit of £136,400 (US$270,260)—a little more than the price of a single ticket. That the company is making a profit at all is a little surprising, since it’s still in its early stages with (presumably) large expenditures involved with the development of SpaceShipTwo and White Knight Two, although that depends on exactly how those expenses are accounted for, and their timing. The total development cost for the project is still pegged at around $250 million, with $80 million, provided by Virgin Galactic’s corporate parent, the Virgin Group, spent.

Rocketplane Global, the suborbital vehicle developer, issued a pair of press releases last week (curiously not available on their web site) announcing some personnel changes. David Faulkner, who has been the program manager for the Rocketplane XP vehicle project, is now the company’s CTO. Paul Metz, a veteran test pilot who had been the chief test pilot for the F-22, among other fighter aircraft, is now a company vice president and chief test pilot. He fills a position formerly held by John Herrington, who left the company at the end of last year.

An article in this week’s print edition of Space News (and not available online) reports that Rocketplane Global “has completed an overhaul of its effort” to develop the XP, and is also now independent of its former corporate parent, Rocketplane Inc. “There is no affiliation between Rocketplane Global and the remnants of the Rocketplane organization,” Rocketplane Global chairman Craig Dickman told Space News. (This separation is not yet reflected on the Rocketplane Inc. site, which still lists Rocketplane Global as one of two operating subsidiaries, along with Rocketplane Kistler.)

As for the company’s financial status, there are few new details in the article, and no specifics about how much has been spent on the XP development and how much more is needed. Faulkner said only that spending has been “within industry norms for a prototype program”.

Space Adventures announced today that it has acquired a 100% stake in Zero Gravity Corporation, the company that provides parabolic flights that simulate weightlessness. Space Adventures already had a stake in the company (of undisclosed size, but said to be “one of the largest investors” in Zero-G); terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. “Our decision to acquire the remaining equity in ZERO-G is a strategic fit within Space Adventures’ overall business plan, strengthening our position as the only operational commercial spaceflight services company,” Eric Anderson, president and CEO of Space Adventures, said in a statement. Zero Gravity Corp. will continue as a separate operating unit, with co-founder Peter Diamandis continuing as CEO. Diamandis, who also co-founded Space Adventures, will become managing director of the company as well. Former NASA astronaut Byron Lichtenberg, another Zero-G co-founder, will remain as CTO of the unit. The deal actually dates back to the beginning of the year, but was not announced until today.

This acquisition is not necessarily that surprising (given in part that Diamandis helped found both companies). Space Adventures cut its teeth back in the late 90s selling zero-g flights in Russia (since Zero-G was still working its way through the regulatory process to permit such commercial flights in the US), and bringing that capability in-house doubtless has some financial benefits to the company. The press release plays up the vertical integration aspect of the deal, allowing the same company to offer everything from the parabolic flights to orbital missions, but right now there’s not much in-between, especially since Space Adventures has been downplaying earlier plans to develop suborbital vehicles.

Indian television network NDTV posted a transcript of a recent interview with Richard Branson. (The transcript is very rough; perhaps it has gone through multiple translations, such as from English to Hindi back to English, given the odd language found in it.) In the interview, Branson appears to indicate that SpaceShipTwo will be rolled out at the end of the year, followed by ninth months of test flights before beginning customer flights. He also says, puzzlingly, “In July of this year, we will fly them over ship for the first time”—a reference to the first flights of White Knight Two?

As for those occasional reports that William Shatner was offered (or had accepted) a flight on SS2, Branson said, “He definitely made it clear that he was quite frightened to go into the space and I got a feeling that he will never actually go into the space.” Regarding the risks of human spaceflight, he added, “anybody going into the space will have to accept that there are more inherited risks in the space travel than the airline travel. But we hope that within three years or so, it will be no great a risk.”

A press release yesterday by a company called Broadway Media (whose founder, Mitchell Schultz, also recently started Xtraordinary Adventures, a space tourism company) announced the unveiling of a new publication: Space Cruise News, billed as “the who, what, where, when and how in the race to suborbital space” (I guess you’ll have to go elsewhere to find out the “why”). “In today’s world of constant media frenzy, it’s often difficult to separate credibility from clutter,” the press release states. And certainly it would be helpful to have another source of information on top of the existing one that could help distinguish the two. So far, though, the product is not promising.

The site is claiming an “exclusive first”: that Robert Bigelow and Donald Trump are “close to a deal” to put Trump’s name on Bigelow Aerospace’s current and future expandable spacecraft. Sounds intriguing, except when you get into the details, like this: “…the TRUMP name on Bigalow’s [sic] Genesis I and II and perhaps III and more that will host the weary space traveler for the night.” Besides the misspelling of Bigelow’s name (which is consistently misspelled throughout the article), there is no Genesis 3 spacecraft planned (the company is moving ahead with Sundancer around 2010). Moreover, Bigelow and other company officials have emphatically stated on a number of occasions that they are nor in the hotel business, although they would be willing to lease their modules to companies that would operate them as tourist destinations. And, of course, neither Genesis 1 nor Genesis 2 are designed for human habitation.

A commenter on RLV and Space Transport News got a comment from Bigelow spokesman Chris Reed, who said that he had “heard nothing on my end about any negotiations between our company and Donald Trump,” and also reiterated that there would be no Genesis 3 mission.

“Lots of details to be worked out but it sound [sic] pretty spacey to us!” the report notes. Spacey? Maybe spaced out, instead. In its quest to separate “credibility from clutter”, this new publication is in danger of falling into the latter category.