| Xcor joins commercial space race |
The race to become the first private company capable of launching paying customers into space got more crowded last week as a small but well-respected California firm announced plans to have a two-seat spacecraft ready within 2 years.
The mini-ship, built by Mojave-based Xcor Aerospace and designed to fly to the edge of space, is expected to be ready for test flights by 2010, around the time Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic hopes to send its much larger spaceship on its maiden voyage.
More than half a dozen other companies -- most, unlike Xcor, bankrolled by wealthy businessmen, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal -- are building rockets and spacecraft that they hope will capture the imagination of space travelers. Most plan to finish testing their rockets and rocket planes in the next few years, and the FAA has estimated the market for space tourism to be more than $1 billion by the year 2021.
In announcing his company's plans, Xcor chief executive Jeff Greason revealed last week that his company's spaceship, called the Lynx, will have an unusual but understandably interested partner: the Air Force.
The Air Force recently announced that it awarded Xcor a small-business research contract -- usually between $700,000 and $900,000 -- to demonstrate the capabilities of the spacecraft. The U.S. fleet of space shuttles, which are fixed-wing spacecraft like the Lynx, is scheduled to be retired in 2010, but the Air Force has voiced interest in continuing that technology. The Lynx could help provide a model.
Roughly the size of a small private airplane, the initial Lynx is expected to fly about 38 miles high, and the follow-up version will go up to 63 miles, generally considered the beginning of space. Like most rocket companies aiming for the space tourism market, Xcor plans to create a ship that can enter orbit -- about 130 miles up -- Greason said.
The company also plans to make the vehicle fully reusable, an aim of many commercial rocketmakers. It has been working for nine years on building reusable rockets and has flown two different rocket-powered vehicles.
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