XCOR: If At First You Don't Succeed …
XCOR Co-Founders Establish New Company, Space News
“The three left XCOR to found a new company, Agile Aero. That company, which, like XCOR, is based in Midland, Texas, will be focused on addressing a problem Greason says has afflicted XCOR and other aerospace companies: the inability to rapidly develop and test vehicles, be they high-speed aircraft or launch vehicles. “We’ve seen so many companies run into the same obstacle,” he said in an interview. “Once you get past cylindrical designs into vehicles that have lift in the atmosphere, the complexity gets to the point where the ability of people to try things rapidly, and succeed or fail fast, runs out of steam.”
XCOR Aerospace co-founders launch new startup: Agile Aero for the next frontier, Geekwire
“Greason noted that the past few years have seen a dramatic uptick in the pace of development for small satellites and rocket engines, but that “nobody has had much luck with rapid-prototyping [advanced aerospace] vehicles, except for making missile shapes.” “We don’t know exactly how to do it yet, but we have a clear understanding of the challenge,” he said.”
XCOR Space Expeditions Announces New Ticket Price as Lynx Approaches Completion, XCOR
“XCOR Space Expeditions announced that it will raise the price of a flight aboard XCOR Lynx from $100,000 to $150,000 effective January 1st, 2016.”
Keith’s note: So … the guys who founded and ran XCOR are leaving XCOR to start a new company that will solve the problems that they could not solve at XCOR. It does not seem like they have a good track record in that regard (both DeLong and Greason had prominent roles at Rotary Rocket). Just sayin’.
Exactly… Jeff “walks on water” Greason fan-club cannot comprehend that this is actually bad news for XCOR and Greason. There’s a lot more to this story, I suspect. Greason is likely not staying on the board of XCOR for long.
Yes it does seem “interesting.” Now that that suborbital bird of theirs is finally taking an “I’m for real” shape, he’s looking to punch out?
Almost reads like Engineer’s Disease, where the afflicted can’t stop designing long enough to actually build the contraption. And when his company is actually building the thing, he goes through a withdrawal and rationalizes wanting to run off and to another company (where he can keep designing happily ever after).
So dealing with the atmosphere and high Mach numbers is difficult – wow – what a surprise?! So the obvious answer is ditch the old company and form another – like THAT’s going to change physics!
It’s true NASA could do things better and some new commercial firms, like SpaceX have persevered with a lot of money and been successful but all these new firms that think they can do this easily or simply if they just get away from government are deluded. Space is hard – it was for von Braun and Korolev and its still hard for Musk & Branson.
I agree we are not getting the full story, but obviously there was a falling out with the people who provided the backing. Both XCOR and Virgin have run into difficulties with winged designs.
We need to understand the real utility of wings on a spacecraft, which is primarily to achieve a soft landing with a spacecraft of 15 tons (beyond the limit for parachutes and airbags) to 100 tons or more. If that isn’t required, a parachute is more practical. As to winged spacecraft configuration, the X-37, with its relatively small and thin airfoils, delta wing providing a smooth transition from entry to gliding flight but mounted midships with the V-tail providing excellent pitch authority, and elimination of the little-used vertical stabilizer has proven a practical approach and one would need a good reason to go back to the conventional delta wing and vertical fin of the Shuttle.
Second, to test a design of a new spacecraft, the initial flights should be made unmanned.
Third, a spacecraft needs a clear goal, whether that is simply testing a design concept or actual;ly making money. With only one passenger and insufficient power to beak the von Karman line it isn’t clear XCOR could attract enough customers for a tourist flight, and its potential for evolution to orbital capability is unclear. In contrast Blue Origin has demonstrated a simpler system that can carry several tourists to 100km, land the passengers by parachute in a lightweight capsule, and (apparently) recovered the booster with a powered landing. Simply scaling up a bit and adding a second stage in place of the capsule might achieve orbital capability. Blue is proceeding in that direction with its methane fueled engines.
1. Liquid fueled rocket powered vertical landing is an alternative to both parachutes and wings/lifting bodies. For a manned design, during launch you need reliable “escape rockets” anyway, so why not use them for landing after a nominal mission? There is also no reason you can’t test this landing mode as an unmanned vehicle before risking passengers. Many small companies now have quite deep VTVL experience with smaller test vehicles. Scaling this up to full size seems fairly straight forward.
2. Agreed, so it’s nice to have a revenue stream when doing so. Other than cargo resupply to ISS, I’m not sure what other paying markets would be “out there” for an unmanned vehicle.
3. Possibly, but many companies have successfully flown suborbital demonstrators of one type or another only to fail at “scaling up” to orbital capability. Looking at requirements like delta-V, aerodynamics, and thermal protection, suborbital is a cake walk compared to orbital.
“Second, to test a design of a new spacecraft, the initial flights should be made unmanned.” — Initial?
Explosions highlight the fact that launching Class A cargo (crew or $B satellites) needs every uncrewed vehicle in a common configuration it can get, perhaps with a return capsule, to find that unknown failure mode (e.g. a strut after how many flights?).
When launching cheap payload, one can take more risks with a less expensive LV (one on its nth re-use flight) to reduce costs as well, perhaps with a return capsule with ‘active’ parachutes, e.g. New Shepard and Falcon. A reuseable lower stage would substantial reduce launch costs and reliability must be flight demonstrated. Scalability: One engine for passengers?
Multiple test flights are important to identify unanticipated design flaws. However virtually all deterministic failure modes will become apparent within half a dozen or so flights.
The strut that failed, however, was designed properly. The SpaceX loss was due to a different problem, the failure of the supplier to maintain adequate control of the manufacturing process. This can occur at any time during the life of a program and is most effectively prevented by continuous sampling of components and testing them to failure. If the process is under control, component properties will vary according to a normal distribution with a consistent standard deviation. If testing shows even occasional components outside the normal distribution (i.e. with properties more than 2-3 standard deviations from the mean), even if they meet the acceptance specification then the process is no longer under control.
“The strut that failed, however, was designed properly. “
Not true at all. It used the wrong manufacturing process for the operational conditions, hence it was designed wrong.
And SpaceX tests all the struts now, not just a sampling, and other components from 3rd parties I believe (obviously not to failure).
I found this informative:
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
In short, XCOR thinks they are in the business of providing a service, and Greason et. al. think they are in the business of designing stuff.
A more… mature, as in considered or common or business savvy… re-organization would have been to spin off XCOR and form a parent company for providing design and rapid prototyping.
Hobby angle vs. taking it to production? In another forum subject about Pall Moller’s Skycar was discussed, some say it cannot be done but one person wrote it can be done and even more so with today’s technology. This same person went on to say taking it to production does not appear to be the business model.
He went on about his first job was working for a guy like this (I saved the quote is it was quite interesting):
“He paid his small staff to keep developing his idea year after year but when you worked for him for a while you realized he had no plan to actually take his project through the regulatory process and into production; it was actually a hobby for him, that was just there to make enough money to stay in business and interesting enough to keep him busy and fiddling until he could retire. My old boss could attract young workers to join (and work cheap) for a while and then get new ones as each figured out the hobby angle.”