Jennifer Brisco, winner of XCOR's suborbital flight giveaway poses in the full size Lynx cockpit model at the Spacecraft Technology Expo in Los Angeles. (Credit: XCOR)

Mojave CA, May 16, 2012 (XCOR PR): XCOR Aerospace today announced the grand prize winner of a trip aboard the Lynx Mark I suborbital launch vehicle. XCOR Chief Operating Officer Andrew Nelson made the announcement at the Spacecraft Technology Expo (STE) in Los Angeles, CA.

“About two months ago, we were at an event called the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, where together with the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) we gave away a suborbital flight,” said XCOR Chief Operating Officer Andrew Nelson. “We had a winner, and we had a backup.   Unfortunately our main winner was unable to accept the prize.   Our backup winner, Jennifer Brisco, is now the official recipient of the suborbital flight.”

Jennifer, who hails from the San Francisco Bay Area was flown in to the Spacecraft Technology Expo in Los Angeles to receive the prize. She did not know that she had been selected until presented with the award at the Expo.

“It’s been my lifetime goal to take a suborbital flight,” said Jennifer.   “This is an absolute dream…I am in shock right now, I am speechless.”

Jennifer, who is a space enthusiast, will be eligible to fly on the Lynx mark I as a suborbital researcher after passing a medical exam and completing a three day training program that includes altitude and G-force exposure.

Jennifer poses with her giant ticket and members of XCOR's team. Left to Right: "Geo" Liccaradello, Mike Massee, Jennifer Brsico, Andrew Nelson, Khaki McKee and Lee Valentine. (Credit: XCOR)

“XCOR continues to bring down the costs and barriers associated with commercial human spaceflight,” remarked Andrew.   “Reusable Launch Vehicles such as Lynx will usher in a whole new era of accessibility to space by offering routine, affordable and safe trips outside the atmosphere. We look forward to being on the vanguard of this revolution in affordable access to the cosmos.”

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XCOR Aerospace is a California corporation located in Mojave, California. The company is in the business of developing and producing safe, reliable and reusable rocket powered vehicles, propulsion systems, advanced non-flammable composites and other enabling technologies like rocket piston pumps that enable full reusability. XCOR is working with aerospace prime contractors and government customers on major propulsion systems, and concurrently building the Lynx, a piloted, two-seat, fully reusable, liquid rocket powered vehicle that takes off and lands horizontally.  The Lynx-family of vehicles serves three primary missions depending on their specific type including: research & scientific missions, private spaceflight, and micro satellite launch (only on the Lynx Mark III).  The Lynx production models (designated Lynx Mark II) are designed to be robust, multi-mission (research / scientific or private spaceflight) commercial vehicles capable of flying to 100+ km in altitude up to four times per day and are being offered globally on a wet lease basis.  (www.xcor.com).

The Rocketplane has been revived.

Rocketplane Global, which went under two years ago, is out of bankruptcy and searching for about $100 million in investment to build its six-passenger suborbital space vehicle.

Speaking at the Next-generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Palo Alto, Calif., Vice President of Business Development Chuck Lauer said the firm came out of bankruptcy last  year under a new Wisconsin-based holding company called Space Assets, LLC. Original backer George French is involved in the new venture.

Space Assets was the winning bidder in an auction in December for the assets of Rocketplane’s Kistler parent company, Lauer said. Those assets included Rocketplane Global’s trademark and intellectual property.

The plan is to raise funds to build the space vehicle and to fly it out of Europe and Asia on wet lease arrangements, Lauer said. A subsidiary, SpaceLinq N.V., has been established in The Netherlands to handle European operations. The vehicle would fly out of spaceports in Holland and Barcelona, Spain. A Spacelinq company also will be set up in Asi. 

Lauer said that the investment climate in the United States remains poor, so the company is seeking investment overseas.

Space Assets has a plan to launch suborbital payloads using modified F-104 fighters from Florida in order to bring in revenue. He said that service should be made operational in about two years.

Rocketplane Global declared bankruptcy in 2010 after spending about $25 million to develop the business-jet sized space plane. The company was awarded $17 million in tax credits from the state of Oklahoma for operating at the Burns Flat spaceport.

SpaceShipTwo glides downward on its first test flight. (Photo: Mark Greenberg)

A new quarterly, New Space Magazine , has launched. It includes an article from Philip A. Janquart titled, “Space Tourism: Will it go far or fizzle out?” in which I’m quoted extensively. Some excerpts:

“Virgin has a lot of money and prestige behind it,” Messier told NewSpace Magazine. “They are, kind of, the Goliath of the industry right now. They just completed another test flight. It’ll be interesting to see how fast they can move with the aggressive schedule they have. One question is their engine: they still need to do a lot of testing.”

But, if Virgin Galactic is Goliath, XCOR and Armadillo are the “Davids” of the story.

“XCOR is a small, scrappy company,” said Messier. “XCOR is the expert at engines and I think they have a workable design and their funding now seems solid. They are looking at initial test flights by the end of 2011. There seems to be a lot of people interested in doing this (visiting space). The issue will be how good are the flights, reliability and a lot of other factors. But I think there is a market. Companies are also looking to the suborbital experiment market as part of their revenue stream”

There is also a sizable market developing for orbital flights. The Russians have been sending the very wealthy to the ISS (International Space Station) for years.

“The missing link is a commercial transport to low-Earth orbit,” Messier added. “It’s only about 250 miles up, but right now governments have a monopoly on it. Break that stranglehold, and you could see an explosion of commercial development in low-Earth orbit. In ten years, the space industry could be totally unrecognizable.

Read the full story.

CSF PRESS RELEASE AND FACT SHEET

The Commercial Spaceflight Federation and its member organizations, including five providers of commercial reusable suborbital spaceflight services, supports the kind of scientific inquiry that led to the recent Ross et al. Geophysical Research Letters paper titled, “Potential Climate Impact of Black Carbon Emitted by Rockets.” The commercial spaceflight sector aspires to good environmental stewardship.

In an attached fact sheet, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation has clarified several assumptions used by Ross et al in their model-based analysis. Ross et al may have dramatically overestimated the actual environmental impact of reusable suborbital vehicles.

The Commercial Spaceflight Federation, working with its scientific advisory panel, the Suborbital Applications Researchers Group (SARG), and its suborbital spaceflight provider members, is exploring ways the industry can provide research opportunities to document the actual levels of emissions made by suborbital launches through ground test and in-flight experiments. The Commercial Spaceflight Federation is also assembling a panel of independent experts to provide recommendations to the industry and researchers.

The suborbital vehicles now in development will significantly benefit scientific research, particularly climate science, by allowing previously unparalleled access to parts of the upper atmosphere where atmospheric phenomena concerning global change may take place. Toward this end, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation and its suborbital provider members are working with NASA and NOAA on programs to deploy these vehicles and their valuable capabilities as new platforms for scientific instruments. At industry workshops held at the American Geophysical Union annual conference and the Next Generation Suborbital Researchers conferences, the industry received an enthusiastic response from scientists eager to use these new vehicles in their research.

The commercial spaceflight industry looks forward to the coming era of commercially reusable suborbital spaceflight and research, and the Commercial Spaceflight Federation commits to a proactive stewardship of the atmosphere through which these vehicles will fly.

Bretton Alexander, President of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, commented, “The commercial spaceflight industry is deeply committed to protecting the environment and the priceless planet that we call home. Indeed, the ‘overview effect’ of traveling to space is well-known. Those who are blessed with seeing our fragile blue marble from space always return with a reinvigorated passion to protect it.” Alexander added, “Rocket launches are critical for understanding the environment. The NASA and NOAA space programs that provide us with critical atmospheric and climate data were all launched on rockets and would not have been possible without them. Now the new commercial suborbital vehicles in development will allow access to space that the science community has never before had, including for atmospheric and climate data that was previously out of reach.”

FACT SHEET

Regarding Assumptions Used in the Geophysical Research Letters Paper
Titled “Potential Climate Impact of Black Carbon Emitted by Rockets”

• Each of the planned commercial suborbital vehicles has differing combinations of flight profile, anticipated flight rate, and propulsion technology. This means that the specific and idealized assumptions inherent in the Ross et al. study cannot be extended to include the general class of commercial suborbital vehicles.

• As stated in Ross et al., there are many unknowns related to the microphysical properties of the exhaust particles, including size, structure, composition, and coagulation rates. Accordingly, the range of uncertainty in the models could be large and such ambiguities could significantly change the magnitude of the results, yet the paper includes no estimate of margin of error or a range of values for their findings.

• The Ross et al. (2010) research paper assumes 10,000 kg of propellant per launch, but this is well in excess of the propellant load for most suborbital vehicles. For example, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo only has a 6,600 kg propellant load.

• For liquid oxygen/kerosene engines, Ross et al. assumes that they produce 20-40 grams of soot per kilogram of propellant. The lower value of 20g/kg is derived from measurements of an obsolete launch vehicle with 1950′s engine technology. A review of the modern literature, including Rocket Exhaust Plume Phenomenology (Simmons, 2010), suggests that modern engines, which use more oxygen and less fuel, should be an order of magnitude cleaner.

• Ross et al. reports the results of modeling of complex propulsion phenomena and the interaction and effects of propulsion systems on our complex atmosphere. While modeling can serve as a guide to potential effects, only the actual observation of such effects during ground and flight-testing can deliver definitive results regarding environmental impacts, whether large or small.

• It is not yet clear whether Ross et al. included in their analysis the carbon particles present in the stratosphere from various sources, including natural processes such as meteorite dust. Estimates by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scientific intergovernmental body of the United Nations, of the quantity of soot already in the stratosphere are many times greater than the hypothesized emissions assumed by Ross et al

Conference: The Regulation of Suborbital Flights in the European Context
Thursday 16 September 2010

International Institute of Air & Space Law
University of Leiden
Netherlands

The symposium, which be held on 16 September 2010 in Leiden, will focus on the legal issues arising from this new era of human spaceflight by analyzing the perspectives of various stakeholders, and will attempt to formulate some recommendations for its efficient and adequate regulation.

The advent of sub-orbital private human spaceflight has created a need to draft specific legislation in the areas of responsibility, liability, safety, insurance, certification and more. The USA has taken the lead in this respect and has set up an extensive body of (temporary) rules dealing with these issues since 2004, when SpaceShipOne started the new space race, for ‘space tourism’. Although the majority of these activities will take place within the USA, several plans related to sub-orbital space tourism also exist in some EU Member States. The symposium will focus on the legal issues arising from this new era of human spaceflight by analyzing the perspectives of various stakeholders, and will attempt to formulate some recommendations for its efficient and adequate regulation.

Programme and speakers

Chair:  Ms. Tanja Masson-Zwaan, Deputy Director
International Institute of Air and Space Law
President, International Institute of Space Law

Rapporteur:  Ms. Axelle Cartier, Senior Lecturer
International Institute of Air and Space Law

PRELIMINARY PROGRAMME (subject to change)

14.00 – 14.05 hrs  Welcome by Prof. Laurens Jan Brinkhorst, Chairman,
International Institute of Air and Space Law

14.05 – 14.10 hrs  Introduction by Ms. Tanja Masson-Zwaan

14.10 – 14.30 hrs  Sub-orbital space tourism: the Societal Perspective

Dr. André Kuipers
European Astronaut Corps, ESA (invited)

14.30 – 14.50 hrs  The influence of space tourism on space activities in general

Mr. Peter Hulsroj
Director of Legal Affairs and External Relations, ESA, Paris

14.50 – 15.10 hrs  Sub-orbital space tourism regulation: the US Experience

Mr. Steven Mirmina, Senior Attorney, International Law,
NASA Office of the General Counsel, Washington DC

15.10 – 15.40 hrs  Tea break

15.40 – 16.00 hrs  Sub-orbital space tourism: the Perspective of the EU

Mr. Luc Tytgat, European Commission,
DG Mobility & Transport, EU (invited)

16.00 – 16.20 hrs  Sub-orbital space tourism regulation:  EASA’s Perspective

Mr. Michael Gerhard
Legal Adviser, EASA, Cologne

16.20 – 16.40 hrs  Sub-orbital space tourism regulation:  the Safety Perspective

Mr. Tommaso Sgobba
Head of ESA Independent Safety Office

16.40 – 17.15 hrs Panel discussion with all speakers, led by the chair

17.15 – 18.00 hrs Closing Drinks

For more information.

Scaled Composites has completed the first series of tests on the rocket motor for the SpaceShipTwo spacecraft, clearing a major milestone toward testing of the suborbital tourism vehicle, Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn said on Thursday.

“We’re feeling very good about it at the moment,” Whitehorn told attendees at the International Space Development Conference being held outside of Orlando. . Scaled Composites is working with Sierra Nevada Corporation to conduct the engine tests.

Whitehorn also said that SpaceShipTwo will be completed by the end of the year and attached to its WhiteKnightTwo mothership for tests. The plan would be to do an unpowered glide test with the suborbital craft.

Tests of WhiteKnightTwo are progressing nicely, Whitehorn added. On June 19, pilots will take the plane on a long-distance roundtrip flight from Mojave, California to New Mexico to do a flyover during the groundbreaking ceremonies for Spaceport America.

The $225 million desert spaceport will be home base for Virgin Galactic, which will offer suborbital tourism. New Mexico has excellent weather all year round, Virgin also hopes to fly out of other American states as well as Sweden, Scotland, the United Arab Emirates.

Whitehorn said SpaceShipTwo might fly out of Florida during the winter months. He said NASA has been “incredibly helpful” in assisting the company, even offering to allow it to fly out of Cape Canaveral.

The company is aiming to capture business in multiple markets: space tourism, small satellite launches, microgravity and upper atmospheric research, and the testing and certification of space technologies.

Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo with Burt Rutan and Richard Branson

All will get taste of oasis for space: Desert launches will benefit KSC
Florida Today

Florida’s Space Coast will lament the end of the shuttle program and the loss of thousands of great jobs. But 2010 could mark the start of one of the most exciting periods in the history of human spaceflight. Gigantic leaps forward in our ability to fly people in space are coming, and they’re coming fast.

One of the most exciting is quietly marching toward history. Out west, in the deserts of California and New Mexico, work is progressing on a launch system, a spaceship and a spaceport for the international partnership that is the odds-on favorite to become the world’s first “spaceline” for tourists.

In the Mojave Desert, the loss of three lives in a test-firing accident slowed but did not stop the development of SpaceShipTwo for Virgin Galactic. The aircraft that will carry the spaceship to its “launch site” in the sky already has broken records in test flights. The football-shaped spacecraft could be rolled out for public viewing this fall and could make test flights soon after.

The British company says hundreds of people have made deposits on the $200,000 tickets for one of six seats aboard the spaceliner once test flights prove it is safe.

Read the full story.

JAA said Thursday’s meeting was another step in the process of bringing commercial space flights to Cecil Field. Officials were able to get input from the public, much of which was opposed plans to bring the Navy back to Cecil Field a few years ago.

However, residents who live nearby showed up at the meeting with a different perspective on Cecil Field becoming a spaceport.

“From what I understand, you’re looking at limited operations,” one resident said.

One of the concerns when the Navy considered coming back to Cecil Field was about the number of flights coming in and out of the field on daily basis. With the spaceport there would be roughly 52 flights a year — one a week.

Read the full story.

The Big Island of Hawaii

Fly Me to the Moon
Honolulu Weekly

“Ever since I was a child, I’ve thought space travel was fascinating,” said Rep. Gene Ward in support of House Bill 994, which would promote space tourism ventures on Oahu.

“We have a lot of space cadets around here,” he laughed. “Think of weightlessness–what a fantastic experience to be had. And without having to go to the moon!”

He says the bill is a step toward building a local spaceport for rocket-powered aircraft that could take passengers in record speed to faraway locations, but that could also take passengers straight up for a better look of the Islands below.

“Can you imagine looking at all the Hawaiian Islands, the entire island chain, from above in one full glance?” he said. “It would be breathtaking and, really, out of this world.”

Read the full story.

It's ain't easy being green!

The Guardian’s Leo Hickman raises some interesting questions about Virgin Galactic’s environmental claims:

The company says that it has built a “clean spaceship” and that the “CO2 emissions per passenger on a spaceflight will be equivalent to approximately 60% of a per passenger return commercial London/New York flight”.

It’s hard to see how that calculation stacks up but Virgin has yet to break down these figures so we have no real way of knowing.

What it does say to support its environmental claims is that an “air launch means short rocket burn”, the “carrier aircraft uses the latest highly efficient turbo fan jet engines”, and that SpaceShipTwo’s re-entry and landing are “unpowered”. A “litres of fuel burned per flight” figure would probably better serve this particular debate, though.

I agree. I would like to see Virgin release the figures and methodology behind the claim. Otherwise, it seems like an apples and walnuts comparison.

I’m wondering if they have properly accounted for the weight of luggage, cargo, food and beverages, or the 14-member crew of a 747. The WK2/SS2 carries all of 10 people (six passengers, four crew) on two-hour bare bones journey that begins and ends at the exact same place. No luggage, cargo, entertainment systems or first-class seats that fold out into beds.

And, as Hickman mentions, SS2 is not like an airplane; it’s got one shot at landing. It misses and bam, you’re plowing into the Joshua trees.

Hickman also examines another of Virgin’s environmental claims:

But in a recent interview with Reuters, Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn added another extraordinary environmental claim to his growing collection by arguing that “every astronaut is an environmentalist”. Viewing Earth from space would transform people’s attitudes to the environment, he said. Isn’t this a rather extravagant and self-defeating way to reach such a conclusion, though?

Couldn’t they just, say, watch a David Attenborough documentary like the rest of us rather than set fire to large quantities of rocket fuel to achieve their eureka moment?

An excellent question. I’ve never been anywhere near space and I get it. Richard Branson gets it. Lots of people get it.

And, if given a choice, are billionauts and millionauts going to put their money into (a) saving the Amazon rain forest; (b) going up again; or (c) investing in a project to build an orbital hotel where they can vacation without having to pay the Russians $35 million?

My guess is (b) and (c) more than (a). Although our current corps of space voyagers has made some efforts to protect the Earth (Rusty Schweikert’s efforts on asteroids comes to mind), most of them have been proponents of more spending on human spaceflight, i.e., getting more people into space.

Given the need to bring down orbital spaceflight to some reason cost, and the sheer amount of infrastructure you would need to build up out there, the development of space could eat up decades of investment capital. There would be returns on investments, of course, but it will soak up a lot of money for quite some time.

Well, these matters are open for debate. For now, I’d like the see the actual numbers behind Virgin’s environment claims. If they’re solid, there should be no reason to withhold them.

Read Hickman’s full story.

Artists conception of WhiteKnightTwo and the SpaceShipTwo space tourism vehicle. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)

Commercial space travel: what it might feel like
Sunday Star Times

It’s a good thing Ron Stroeven is not worried about having to wait until SpaceShipTwo is pronounced fit to take paying guests to experience the trip into space just as the test pilots have. It could be 2010, when the flamboyant founder of Virgin Galactic, Richard Branson, will turn 60. But it will probably be 2011. The company expects to do up to 18 months of test flights before taking people into space. White Knight Two made its debut flight just before Christmas last year.

Stroeven, who runs a successful international software business out of Auckland, has paid half his fare of $US200,000, his promptness putting him in the first 400-500 group of passengers sorry, astronauts to go.

Stroeven, one of four New Zealanders already committed to spending a small fortune to touch the edge of space, is just the kind of passenger apart from celebrities like Paris Hilton, Sigourney Weaver and Kiss’s Gene Simmons, whose names have been bandied over the years Virgin Galactic must love. He’s serious, patient, focused. Despite Virgin founder Branson’s blandishment at the Sydney event via a video link to “have a drink, or two, or three, or four, or five, on me”, Stroeven stuck to water.

Read the full story.

Virgin Galactic's WhiteKnightTwo with SpaceShipTwo (credit: Virgin Galactic)

Attention earthlings: more spaceports coming soon
HotelierMiddleEast.com

Whitehorn said he envisaged the price of the ticket decreasing once the concept became more popular and more spacecraft had been built.

“In five years we will get the price halved [to $100,000],” he said. “If you look at it, when you get into more of a mass market, it’s actually very easy to expand things from there. By this time we will have done a lot of flights.”

“It’s not going to be as safe as travelling on a Boeing 747 because it’s space travel, but it’s so much safer than anything done in space before,” he said. “I would expect it to be on par with travelling in a light aircraft, which is pretty safe.”

Read the full story.

Spaceport America

Spaceport America Offers Jobs
KAOT-TV

Officials said they’re looking to employ about 475 people to build the project and they want to hire New Mexicans.

“There will be road contractors, fencing, electrical contractors — there will be 14 general contractors on the job site,” said construction manager John Roberts. A call for bids will be advertised next week. Contractors will then have 30 days to submit their bid for the work.

Read the full story.

XCOR's Lynx suborbital vehicle

Hey everyone.

I’ve got an analysis piece over on the Commercial Space Gateway titled, Virgin Galactic vs. XCOR: Who Will Be First?

The title pretty much says it all. I’m an Author-Analyst over at CSG now, so I will be contributing pieces there on a regular basis about space, technology and the environment.

There’s some interesting information coming out of a Virgin Galactic press conference in Australia today where it was announced that Brisbane fashion shop owner Glenys Ambe would be the first Australian to fly into space aboard SpaceShipTwo. iTNews reports that:

• 11 Australians have put down deposits for suborbital flights out of roughly 300 people worldwide;
• Virgin wants to sell at least 200 tickets before the first commercial flights in 2011 – and 50,000 tickets in the first ten years of operation;
• It could take 15 years to drop the price of flights to equal that of a new car;
• Six passengers and two pilots will experience four minutes of weightlessness during the two-hour flights;
• The flights are so easy that even a caveman pilots of local regional carriers like Virgin Blue and Pacific Blue can be trained to fly them.

Read the full story.