The XCOR Lynx Spaceplane Might Be Down for the Count , Popular Mechanics
“Even before this news, a shakeup was in the works. Some of the original XCOR gang-founder Jeff Greason and early backer Stephen Fleming-were bounced from the company’s board of directors in March. Greason, XCOR’s CEO turned chief technologist (another cross into Silicon Valley terrain) left the company in 2015. One board replacement: Michael Gass, the former president and chief executive of ULA. Those who see traditional space industry invading the private space movement, take note of this move.”

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7 replies on “Trouble at XCOR?”

  1. Not good… I’ve been rooting for that sweet little space bird, since XCOR’s birth.

    Maybe after focusing on their excellent and unique rocket engine tech, and further building up their aerospace cred (and their revenue) they may yet one day roll that kitty out for a spacewalk.

  2. XCOR has an excellent reputation for engine technology, however the suborbital market has not proven to be profitable so far.

    1. I’ve heard the NASA science support is struggling with the whole concept of commercial suborbitals. The system is set up for funding payloads and then flying them on sounding rockets, where NASA is deeply involved in managing the launch and does, in effect, bulk purchases (contracts for a large number of launches over the course of several years.) They are also set up to fund payloads which fly, for free, on someone else’s spacecraft. But they don’t quite have flying on someone else’s spacecraft and having to pay for a ticket figured out.

      1. Which no doubt occupies at least part of the Mars negotiations between Mr. Musk and NASA.

        On the other hand, they do have experience with the Russians doing that very thing.

        1. SpaceX is different. That’s a negotiation between NASA and another organization.

          I was talking about the NASA proposal process. It’s set up so people can propose to build an instrument and then hand it over to a specified NASA program (one responsible for launching sounding rockets, or another for finding rides for secondary payloads.) The contracting system is also set up for people to propose developing “hosted payloads” that some other agency or country will put on their spacecraft for free. But the formal proposal process just doesn’t place (so far and last time I checked) to propose for instrument development money and then tack on $2 million (or whatever) for the ride. Since it’s a competitive processes, I don’t think they can’t let people write something in and ask for an exception. That wouldn’t be fair to other proposals which followed the rules as written.

          This isn’t a unique problem. I’ve been told NASA is still struggling with how to fund certain types of research in Antarctica. The administrative details of NASA funding a university researcher to pay NSF for support in Antarctica isn’t straightforward. At least not in some cases.

      2. Sounding rockets are used mostly for atmospheric science and remote sensing payloads. I could be wrong, but it seems to me the configuration of the Xcor and Virgin suborbital vehicles were not practical for sensors and they were trying to market these vehicles for microgravity experiments, which are difficult to accomplish with just a few minutes of weightlessness.

        1. Sounding rockets are also used for ionospheric studies (which isn’t quite atmospheric science) and UV astronomy. I’ve been paying attention to this because those are things I care about professionally.

          For the ionospheric work, it isn’t clear how suitable the vehicles are. That’s an environment where you care deeply is the outer surface of the vehicle has a 1V or a 5V static electric charge. A friend at APL had some funding to study this, and didn’t think the environment was hopeless.

          For UV astronomy, you could do things looking through the window, but mostly in the NUV (near UV), and I’m interested in the FUV/EUV (far or extreme UV). Planetary aurora mostly live below 200 nm. However, there was (or is) an interesting concept involving the equally conceptual Lynx III’s external cargo pod. You could put a nice UV telescope there, and get the equivalent of one to three sounding rocket flights per week. That might not sound like much, but if such a vehicle existed, the cost of renting one for a year wouldn’t be too different from the operating costs of a telescope like the IRTF. Since it looks like UV astronomy may be back down to sounding rockets once HST is gone, that’s an interesting prospect.

          For microgravity, another colleague at University of Central Florida does a series of experiments about collisions between particles in microgravity (important for ring dynamics and planetary formation.) He’s made good use of everything from Shuttle GAS Cans to sounding rockets to ISS hosted experiments to CubeSats. Well, I’d have to check if the CubeSat has flown yet. The science requires a range of durations, levels of microgravity experiment sizes and abilities to reset or recover the experiment. I know he was interested in the commercial suborbitals. But I agree that’s a niche market and not a real breadwinner for a company like XCor or Virgin.

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