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.

Also in Monday’s issue of The Space Review I discuss some of the issues that are emerging with the screening and training of space tourists, as well as their crew members, based on a panel during the FAA’s annual commercial space transportation conference earlier this month. The highlight of the panel upon which most of the article is based was a presentation by Julia Tizard of Virgin Galactic, who revealed that 65 of 70 of the company’s customers have passed centrifuge training at the NASTAR Center outside Philadelphia. Those who were involved in the training ranged in age from 22 to 88, and included people with less-than-perfect medical histories, such as heart bypass surgery.

There is a concern, though, by some in the industry that regulators could move too quickly to establish rules for spaceflight participant training: Jeff Greason of XCOR said he is “living in fear” of such a move since there’s little known about what kind of training is appropriate, and that the training requirements could be different for different operators. “Codifying our mistakes early,” he said, “is one of the biggest errors we could make.”

Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace gave an overview of his company’s work at Space Access this morning. He noted that the company actually turned a profit last year, with revenues of approximately $3.8 million; the profit was an artifact of the timing of the contracts it was working on, and he said he doesn’t anticipate being profitable again this year, although revenues should be similar to 2006. Because XCOR doesn’t have an independently wealthy founder or patron, “we have to flip burgers for a living”: doing developmental work for a number of government and commercial customers. XCOR selects that work based on the problems XCOR is facing for its own projects, thus in effect getting a customer to pay for XCOR’s R&D. “We have turned R&D from a cost center to a profit center,” he said.

XCOR is working on three engine projects: a 50-lbf engine for RCS applications, a 1,500-lbf engine for the Rocket Racing League (RRL), and a 7,500-lbf engine with ATK for NASA. The efforts are all going well, and Greason said that the RRL engine work, which had been going slowly at the request of the customer, is now ready to go back into high gear. XCOR is also still developing its own suborbital vehicle design, although Greason gave few specific details about the project, and no development schedule or funding information (although he did say later that have not finished raising all the money they need for the effort, but are close.) He did say that XCOR will, in the future, offer more details about its long-term roadmap, in much the same way Masten Space Systems does. “Suborbital is not the last step on our road.”

So what good is space tourism, rocket racing, or other seemingly-trivial endeavors? They’re actually very important, Taylor Dinerman argues in this week’s edition of The Space Review. Such ventures can stimulate interest in the space industry among students, and a vibrant industry filled with small developers is as important to the overall space field as small experimental airplane developers are to the overall aviation industry, he believes. “Over time it is going to make the space industry a greater and greater part of the US and world economy. Just as motor sports helped develop cars that eventually brought mobility to millions, space sports have the potential to bring space travel to a public with undreamed of results.”

Also in this week’s TSR, I have an article about risk, or at least the perception of risk, in both public and private space endeavors. A panel at the NewSpace 2006 conference back in July tackled this issue as it related to personal spaceflight, with Reda Anderson (Rocketplane’s first customer) and XCOR’s Randall Clague discussed informed consent and how to minimize the risk of flying in suborbital vehicles. (Anderson’s approach: going to Rocketplane’s factory and “shake hands and hug every one of the men and women there and say, ‘Hi, I’m Reda Anderson. I may look like payload to you, but I look like a human to me, and my only acceptable risk is to come back in equal or better condition than when I went up there.’” That works, although it may not be that scalable.

There were a lot of good presentations Friday at the Space Access ’06 conference in Phoenix, although not necessarily a lot of breaking news. Given limited time (plus the fact that the wireless network in the conference room was down most of the day) I’ll for the moment provide some brief highlights:

Rick Homans, secretary of the Economic Development Department of the state of New Mexico, said he had no involvement in the space industry prior to taking office in January 2003; shortly after taking office he was briefed on the state’s Office of Space Commercialization and spaceport plans. He said the state decided to put in a “very aggressive bid” when they received the RFP for the X Prize Cup, recognizing it as their best and perhaps only shot to develop the spaceport. That eventually led to winning $114 million in state funding earlier this year for the spaceport, although most of that funding, he said, is conditioned on receiving an FAA spaceport license, signing a lease with an anchor tenant (Virgin Galactic), and a bona fide cost estimate for the spaceport that demonstrates it will cost no more than $225 million to build. He said the state expects the FAA license by the end of 2006 or the first quarter of 2007.

[Disclosure: my employer performed an economic impact study about the proposed spaceport for the Economic Development Department.]

John Carmack of Armadillo Aerospace provided an update on his efforts, emphasizing, as usual, the various technical accomplishments and plans of his team. Armadillo is now focusing on building a pair of VTVL vehicles to compete for the two levels of Lunar Lander Challenge planned for October at the X Prize Cup. The larger vehicle, designed for level 2 (180 seconds of flight time) would also be able to carry cargo or passengers to 100 kilometers; he said there is “a real possibility” of flying that vehicle to 100 km by the end of the year, although through October Armadillo will be focused on the challenge. The launch site for those flights remains to be determined: New Mexico is a backup site, although farther away than Carmack likes. They hope instead to be able to fly from private land in Texas. All this is being done on a tiny budget: Carmack said his burn rate is less than half a million dollars a year.

Chuck Lauer of Rocketplane Kistler discussed the efforts of both Rocketplane and Kistler Aerospace, which Rocketplane’s president, George French, acquired earlier this year. Rocketplane’s development appears to be on schedule: one wing, a structural test article, is nearly complete and will soon be tested to destruction. Engine tests using the RS-88 engine being loaned from NASA will begin this summer. Rocketplane Kistler submitted a COTS proposal to NASA to accelerate development of the long-stalled K-1 TSTO RLV: if they win it, Lauer said the K-1 could be ready to fly in 2008. Even without COTS, Lauer said, they still plan to raise private funding to develop the K-1, with a focus on several markets, including orbital space tourism: the K-1 could carry 5-6 people, he said.

Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace said his company’s fortunes are looking good. The company booked $1.1 million in revenue in 2005 and will earn $3.5 million in 2006 under its current contracts alone. XCOR now has 25 employees and is looking to hire several more, including engineers and project managers, by the end of the year. (One of those new employees is reportedly Henry Vanderbilt, who announced earlier this year he was going to work for an unnamed company in this industry.) While XCOR is focusing most of its efforts on several projects, like the X-Racer and LOX tank development, he said that a couple of people in the company are still focused on developing a suborbital vehicle. XCOR still does not have full funding for the vehicle, but has raised more than half.

Reda Anderson, the first customer for Rocketplane Kistler’s XP spaceplane, talked about what was important to her as a customer. (She doesn’t like the term “space tourist”, preferring something like “explorer”.) Safety, communications, integrity, and catering to the passenger’s friends and family are all key things she looks for in a company providing tourism services, she said. She also showed off the “contract” she made with Lauer in October 2004: a dollar bill wrapped around a business card:

Perhaps the coolest item of the day was a presentation by Timothy Bendel of Frontier Astronautics. His small company, which is developing an attitude control system for Masten Space Systems as well as a rocket engine, needed to find a new place for its engine development work since local authorities in Colorado blocked such work. They found an ideal location in the small town of Chugwater, Wyoming, north of Cheyenne: a facility complete with machine shop, three phase power, huge concrete facilities, and lots of land, with paved access to I-25. What is it? An abandoned Atlas-E ICBM site. Bendel said he plans to lease the site to other companies seeking such facilities, and is also looking into using the site as a spaceport.