Space Tourism Industry Gains New Competitor 104
mattnyc99 writes "There's a new entry in the race for the first space tourism jet: XCOR Aerospace, a California-based rocket builder. The company says its clean-burning, two-seat Lynx spacecraft will lift off by 2010. After we only saw a mockup of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo a couple months back, you'd think this was serious competition in the 'New Space' race, but these photos show that Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites is well on its way with construction."
Not really that great. (Score:3, Informative)
What I am waiting to see is Virgin to decide to talk to Bigelow. In fact, I would be surprised if he has not talked to both Spacex AND bigelow. The reason is that he will want to put up a hotel and get the traffic going. Once he has traffic to a hotel, then it will make pursuing the SSIII quite a bit easier.
Re:Pretty Impressive (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Two Notes (Score:3, Informative)
The book reveals some truly bizarre goings on with the founders of the rocketry movement and includes appearances by Alistair Crowley, cultists, famous sci-fi authors, communists, and a swindling L. Ron Hubbard prior to the founding of Scientology.
I thought I was fairly well versed in the origins of the U.S. space program, but it turns out I didn't know the first thing.
This guy is the main focus of the book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Whiteside_Parsons [wikipedia.org]
Definitely worth a read if only for insight into L. Ron's past, but hearing about the meager beginnings of JPL among others was fascinating.
Happy reading.
Better article; more points worth noting (Score:5, Informative)
Also, some additional points worth noting:
Re:Missed the big one. (Score:3, Informative)
Where do you arrive at that conclusion? Having interned at XCOR, that's not at all my understanding. They are building the Rocket Racer, they built and flew the EZ-Rocket, and they've been publicly discussing Xerus in vague terms for years. (Xerus is the former public name for Lynx.) I interpret this announcement as a good thing, both for XCOR and the industry as a whole.