[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.

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.

The latest Armadillo Aerospace project update has the usual detailed technical descriptions of engine and other vehicle work. At the end, though, John Carmack includes some illustrations of a proposed single-person suborbital vehicle, using a “six pack” of modules. Carmack talked about this concept last year at Space Access ‘07, including the transparent bubble where the passenger would lie (and float around at apogee). Here’s one illustration:

Carmack warns not to “read too many technical details into these concept renderings”, but it still looks pretty interesting. Half the Armadillo team will be at Space Access ‘08 to provide more details on this concept and their other work.

Back in July I noted here that a new Indian TV channel was planning a contest with a suborbital spaceflight as the top prize. Indiantelevision.com reports that the televised portion of this contest is ready to begin, with four episodes starting Sunday. According to the article:

The episodes are divided into four rounds - the crazy TV show, the spykar space party moonwalk, the great combination commentary and the black hole - each comprising of different set of challenges for the contestants.

I’m not sure what a “great combination commentary” is, but overall this series sounds pretty crazy even without the contest so named. The winner will be “India’s first space tourist”, according to the article, but as previously noted here at least one Indian is among Virgin Galactic’s Founders, and probably has an inside track to be the first in space.

A lucky Dutch radio listener will win a suborbital spaceflight, according to a report by Radio Netherlands. The Dutch station “Q-music” is giving away the suborbital flight, provided by Space Adventures; the winner will be announced Saturday during an event at an aviation and space museum in Lelystad. The article is a bit skeptical about whether the winner will actually get to fly into space, given that Space Adventures has made little progress on its suborbital space tourism plans: “It will take years before they’re able to stage a space flight, if at all.”

The Radio Netherlands piece does devote some time to those who claim that space tourism is detrimental to the environment, interviewing Peter van Vliet, who runs a “foundation that promotes sustainability”. Van Vliet claims that emissions from suborbital spacecraft are particularly harmful to the upper levels of the atmosphere, although he doesn’t cite any specific data on such effects (which, of course, would depend on the composition and volume of the emissions.) He claims that space tourism is “unacceptable” in an era where there is growing concern about climate change and the environment: “It’s a classic case of something you just can’t do anymore, in this day and age.” Dangerous words.

A few photos from the X Prize event in LA today:

From left: Bob Weiss of the X Prize Foundation, Larry Page of Google, Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation, and Buzz Aldrin answer questions after the press conference.

While Diamandis talked, a small robotic rover (built by the Univ. of Oklahoma) rolled out onto the stage and onto some faux lunar rocks (where it remained until it was moved by hand later in the press event, either by design or because it got stuck)

A closeup of a model of a future lunar explorer, with a famous past human lunar explorer in the background.

During opening ceremonies for NextFest just before the X Prize announcement, a man with a rocket backpack flew over the crowd (literally — my ears were ringing from the noise of the rocket!) to “deliver” a proclamation to the mayor of LA in honor of the event.

A sentimental favorite: Thursday was an educational day at NextFest, with thousands of students in attendance. After the X Prize event was over a group of kids came over and took positions under a giant model of the Moon by the stage. Education and inspriation of youth was a big theme of the X Prize announcement; let’s hope these kids stay inspired.

The Russian space agency Roskosmos is reviewing applications from several Russians reportedly interested in flying to the ISS as space tourists, the Russian publication Kommersant reported. Space Adventures has reserved the available seat on Soyuz taxi flights to the ISS in the fall of 2008 and spring of 2009, so it’s not clear from this article what role Roskosmos is playing here; the article states that Alexey Krasnov, head of Roskosmos manned flight programs. “appeared never doubting Roskosmos ability to agree with Space Adventures on the issue.” Space Adventures announced last month that it had finalized contracts with Roskosmos for those two flights and would announce who would go on those flights in the “coming weeks”.

There are few new developments into the investigation of the fatal explosion last week in Mojave. The Bakersfield Californian reports that Cal/OSHA investigators continued their work at the airport, a process that is expected to last a few weeks. The three injured Scaled Composites employees remain hospitalized, two in critical condition and one in fair condition.

Scaled’s web site is back online with information about the accident and support fund donation details.

A brief editorial in the Colorado Springs Gazette Tuesday is largely supportive of the emerging industry in spite of the accident. The accident “a reminder – for those who need it – that sending humans into orbit isn’t an easy or risk-free endeavor whether it’s undertaken by the private or the public sector,” the newspaper writes (nevermind that SpaceShipTwo is actually a suborbital vehicle). “But we doubt it will set the effort back for long.”