This was just posted to sci.space.* newsgroups by Jeff Greason, head of XCOR.

FYI, the EZ-Rocket flew a flight, exactly on the plan, exactly on time, at 3:04 PM local time, at the EAA's Oshkosh "AirVenture 2002" today.

Quite an audience (~1E5 people), and the team and I are all very, very happy.

I'm mostly out of contact but there'll be more info later

-- Jeff Greason
XCOR Aerospace

This should be very helpful in raising funds. There are a lot of wealthy aviation enthusiasts present.

"~1E5 people."

What a geek.

Maybe, but he's one of the geeks who's going to get you into space, and open up earthly life to the universe, if you want to go.

If he's a geek, then we should all want to be geeks. There are a hell of a lot of worse things to be.

Rand:

I'm pretty new to the whole XCOR discussion. Could you please clue me into how XCOR is going to get us into space? I'm sceptical but willing to learn.

A good link or two will do. I'm a little leery of folks that claim that low-tech with some smart, high-tech spin can do the job. Livermore Labs attempted that (very badly, IMO) with Brilliant Pebbles.

Don't get me wrong. I'd be in the top 1% of the happiness chart if getting people into space in large quantities became a reality sometime in the next couple of decades. I just don't see (lack of evidence, more than anything else) that XCOR is the first step on the path. There have been rocket planes before. Arguably, those rocket planes were on the edge of space back in the '60s, but they were way beyond XCOR in design, fuel, structures and aerodynamics.

Again, I'm completely willing to be wrong in my scepticism. Hope you're willing to chat about it a bit.

Regards,

Dave Perron

They're going to pick up where rocketplanes left off in the sixties, using twenty-first century technology. And they're going to tackle markets that provide the high flight rates needed to develop operable systems, and generate revenue as they go. First step is suborbital. After that, they'll move on to orbital vehicles, using experience gained from the suborbital market. And hopefully, they'll have competition as well, from companies like Pioneer and others.

There are two main differences between their approach and NASA's.

They are going to test and fly a lot, on their own and their investors' schedule, instead of spending millions on exotic technologies, briefing charts and trade studies, keyed to government budget cycles and program reviews. And they're going to create new markets with affordable vehicles, instead of just trying to cajole industry into building a replacement for the Shuttle.

XCOR is doing everything the right way. They have vision and they have a good business model. They understand that you have to survive in order to make a difference, so they are doing everything necessary to ensure that they continue to be a successful company while they slowly progress to more and more advanced rocketplane designs.

This is the proper way to run a company. In many ways the recent failed startup aerospace companies (Rotary, Beal, etc.) followed a poor business model, i.e. acquire funding, ramp up operations quickly, compete toe-to-toe with existing large companies, expect and rely on large profits in a short timeframe in order to get beyond only investment funding. This is the same business model as many of the failed dot-coms. Get lots of money, grow big fast, expect huge revenues quickly to pay off huge debts. This can work if you're lucky enough to get huge revenues quickly, more often than not it is a recipe for failure. It is better to achieve modest profits first and keep operations as small as possible. Small, profitable companies have an indefinite lifespan, allowing them to continue operations, continue innovating, and continue growing. Getting enough money to build the next generation of products is only a matter of time for a profitable company, not a matter of life and death.

Thanks, Rand.

I guess I was looking for more technical detail, not the business side. I do realize the business side is important, but the technical side is more important. The idea that you can turn a subsonic aircraft into an earth-to-orbit spacecraft does require some technical basis. For example, XCOR's concept suborbital vehicle has a target altitude of 65km and a target maximum "speed" of Mach 4. Now, 65km is effectively (in the sense of aerodynamic lift and control forces) exoatmospheric, so they'd have to generate some vertical velocity at lower altitudes so that they are essentially ballistic at 65 km. Either that, or at some reasonable altitude they'd have to begin transitioning over to being effectively a rocket. At some point they'd no longer begin to generate enough lift (being limited by 4000 fps max velocity) to keep them aloft, so the rocket thrust would have to be more than the ship's mass. This is just basic physics.

The aerodynamic questions are a little out of my league. That's not to say they are not important; in general aircraft control stability is regarded as being fairly important, at least by the pilots. There's a reason test airplanes don't auger in with the frequency they did back in the '60s, and that reason is not better pilots.

All the above is fairly beside the point. If the end of XCOR's design evolution is 65km suborbital flights at roughly 15% of orbital velocity, I say that's not all that useful. If it can be SHOWN that XCOR's suborbital vehicle can be morphed into something that can achieve LEO, then it's definitely worthwhile. Otherwise it's a dead-end design that's effectively a carnival ride.

I realize a lot of their technical data are proprietary, but at some point they've got to lift their skirts a bit and show investors what they've got going for them that other companies (that failed) didn't.

David, you miss the point. The design specifics of the EZ-Rocket or their sub-orbital rocket are irrelevant in relation to orbital vehicles. XCOR's goal is not necessarily to build an orbital vehicle, they might, but they're smart in not locking in future plans before those plans are really ready. Yes, XCOR's suborbital rocket-plane will be a carnival ride. What of it? Isn't orbital tourism a carnival ride as well? The point is that XCOR will be making serious revenue on a rocketplane. They say they have c. 100 reservations for the ~$100,000 flights on their sub-orbital rocketplane. That's $10 million of revenue. That's $10 million more revenue than companies like Rotary, Pioneer, Beal, or Kelly ever brought in. If XCOR can deliver then they will likely get quite a lot more business and quite a lot more revenue. And THEN they will have enough money, and enough experience, and enough technical know-how to MAYBE do something bigger. It may very will be that their sub-orbital rocketplane design is not applicable to orbital spaceflight. That hardly matters though. What does matter is if they can make enough profit through continuing operations of their rocketplanes to stay alive and advance rocketplane technology. It doesn't matter how fancy your rocket designs are, if you're dead you're not relevant.

Rand:

Carnival rides are fine. I've been reading through XCOR's press clippings and it looks to me that XCOR's goal of (and I'm paraphrasing here) building anything people are willing to buy is perfectly consistent with that. For some reason I had this impression that the EZ-rocket was intended to be an evolutionary step to orbit-and-back spacecraft. I think it's safe to conclude that, while they don't exactly rule that out, this is what you'd call a long-term goal.

Perhaps it was the occasional comparison between XCOR and the way NASA does things that led to that false conclusion. Not to defend NASA, but it's not a valid comparison. It's a bit like comparing the part of Lockheed Martin that builds the F-22 with a maker of ultralights. Not the same product, not the same requirements, and not the same market. NASA deserves its lumps but this is not an appropriate weapon, IMO.

Interesting. I hope it leads to bigger and better things, eventually. Are you enthusiastic about these guys because they have a prayer of making a profit before they break into orbit? I think that's a good thing, and novel. I think others (Roton) had their sights fixed on some extremely long-term goals without short-term profitability that would enable them to stay afloat, which is something NASA doesn't have to worry about.

Dave

Sorry, Robin. I didn't pay attention to the signature on that last. Thanks for the information.

It is appropriate to compare them to NASA, because they're doing what NASA never has--making rocket ships operable and reliable, and flying them routinely. EZ-Rocket is an evolutionary step to space, because it's developing the technical experience needed to build routine space transports (experience that NASA simply doesn't have, because they've never attempted to develop it).

And you're wrong, the technical side is not as important as the business side. There are *lots* of ways to solve the technical problem. What's been lacking to date is not technology, but money and markets.

I didn't say there wasn't more than one solution. What I did say is that if XCOR's craft turns out to be an developmental dead-end, it won't be all that useful in the effort to put people in space. I could just as easily say there's more than one way to address the marketing problem, and that it's therefore trivial. But I won't, because it's no more trivial than the engineering problem is.

BTW good posts on the shuttle-LH topics. I hadn't realized LH was so (what IS that word anyway?) un-dense that the tank mass effectively negated the Isp advantage. Is there any advanced propellant work being done at NASA (or elsewhere)? I'd heard of a push to manufacture liquid ozone in quantity but nothing recently.

Dave, you miss the point, and persist in thinking that the reason that we don't have cheap spaceflight is because we don't have the "right" technology. We don't need advanced propellants.

What we need are advanced ways of raising the money to build vehicles. XCOR cannot have a "developmental dead end," because everything that they do teaches them how to build lower-cost vehicles. This is something that no one (most especially NASA) currently knows how to do (except perhaps on a theoretical level), or at least has any experience with.

Once XCOR has demonstrated an ability to routinely and cheaply fly a suborbital vehicle (particularly since NASA has been demonstrating how "hard" it is for an unmanned one, with failures like X-33 and X-34), they will have the credibility necessary to tell an investor that the next step is to build an orbital one. Even if there is zero hardware legacy from the one to the other, it doesn't matter, any more than one has to build a Mac truck based on a Volkswagen chassis.

The question about propellants was unrelated to that of XCOR. Sorry if you took at as related; I just was too lazy to post to the article it referred to.

But since you brought it up, I disagree with you that advanced propellants are irrelevant where it comes to space vehicles.

I also disagree that the development of low-cost vehicles is guaranteed to result in vehicles that can get one or more people into space and back, alive. Lowering the cost to skim the edge of space doesn't equate to the advancement of a design that can get you into orbit. A lower cost vehicle that doesn't do what you want is worthless.

I know it was unrelated. My point is that it's unrelated to reducing costs of space launch in general, because the current high costs aren't a result of the wrong propellant combination.

And I wasn't proposing the development of worthless low-cost vehicles--I was proposing the development of worthwhile ones. Exotic propulsion is not necessary to achieve this.

The reason that lowering the cost to the edge of space is important is because we currently don't know how to do this cheaply. Once we learn, we can apply the lessons to orbital vehicles as well. And no ozone will be required.

Rand:

Still, I'm left with my original question, which is this: Even assuming you can get that small rocket plane up to altitude (and I'm not at all convinced that this concept aircraft XCOR has come up with can do that), what then? You're still a good six and a half kilometers per second short of orbital velocity and over a hundred kilometers too low for a sustainable orbit. Now what do you do? Let's see...assuming you have a vehicle that weighs a mere metric ton, (including passengers) physics says that just to get the delta velocity you need for orbit, you need to be carrying about eight tons of fuel and oxidizer. And that's neglecting orbital insertion burns and the fuel required to overcome gravity during the burn. And, of course, the fuel required to de-orbit.

I appreciate the desire to come up with cheap, reliable rocket engines. That's nice. But I think the next step after that is a doozy, that no amount of clever business plan can even begin to address.

Regards,

Dave Perron

I guess I don't understand the question. The next step after that is straightforward--simply raise the money, and design an orbital vehicle. What is it that's a "doozy" about it? After forty-plus years of experience, we certainly know how to do it, and there are lots of ways to do it. The only thing that has been holding us back is lack of funding--not lack of technology.

You've apparently been listening to too much NASA propaganda. They're in the business of making it sound expensive and difficult, because that's how they justify their budgets and existence.

No, Rand, I am not a NASA hanger-on. I don't listen to ANY NASA propaganda. So I'm not even really sure what your point is, other than an attempt at discrediting what I say without actually pointing out where I'm wrong.

Once the vehicle is done (provided it can reach 65 km, which I'm not at all convinced that it can given the design constraints) then what you have is a carnival ride attempting to raise money to build pretty much the same thing NASA has been trying to build, only on lower cashflow. Sure, the money is private sector. I want to make it clear that I couldn't possibly contain any more approval for private-sector space exploration. But we're talking gigantic sums of money here. Has XCOR shown that it can raise money in these quantities with a carnival ride? I'm curious how many $100k rides there are to sell.

Normally when you see someone attempting to attract investors in the attempt to reach a goal, you at least see some level of initial design that's on a path to meet that goal. I've seen nothing of the kind from XCOR, so I'm a little sceptical they have done much other than make and test some rocket engines and fly a rocket-powered subsonic aircraft around for a while. Not to denigrate those accomplishments, but they are a small fraction of what needst to be done. I have been unable to obtain so much as a back-of-the-envelope analysis that says "here's our vehicle; it has X amount of maximum thrust and carries Y kilograms of fuel/oxidizer. Here's our notional trajectory to 35 km."

BTW I'm not affiliated with any part of Lockheed Martin that's involved with space exploration or payload delivery. My current assignment is a targeting pod for the Air Force. But I have gained some passing familiarity with rocketry, orbital mechanics and aerodynamics, so whenever someone claims to be able to do for a buck and a quarter something that's not been possible, and do it with rudimentary technology, I have to stop and examine it to see if there's something squirrely being done. I can't say that about XCOR because I have been unable to obtain sufficient detail about what's being planned. But neither can I be satisfied that it's all on the up-and-up.

Regards,

Dave Perron