New Rocket Aims for Space Tourism Market

The design of the Lynx rocket was shown off Wednesday by Xcor Aerospace, a Mojave, Calif.-based company that has spent nine years developing rocket engines.

Fueled by liquid oxygen and kerosene, the two-seat ship a bit more slender than a small executive jet is intended to operate like an airliner, making up to four flights a day while using runways for takeoffs and landings like a normal airplane.

CEO Jeff Greason withheld specifics of costs and technical details at a news conference but said he was certain investors will finance construction of the Lynx, which he estimated from will cost "south of $10 million," not including previous development costs.

Xcor has been in talks with companies that may operate Lynx spacecraft for space tourism, Greason said without naming them.

"We don't usually discuss a lot of the details of our projects until the hardware rolls out and that's not so much because of some deep-seated desire to be secret as it is that we don't want to tie the hands of our engineers by saying too much too soon," Greason said.

But he said the decision to talk about the Lynx was primarily due to the involvement of the Air Force, which under a contract has been receiving reports on the progress of Xcor's design work for the past year and recently notified the company it will continue that under a Phase Two contract.

"That will allow them to share in our lessons learned during the program and also to use our vehicle as a test bed for some technologies that they are interested in," Greason said.

Coming two months after British billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic unveiled a model of SpaceShipTwo, a six-passenger vehicle that may begin flight tests this year, the Xcor announcement suggested that real competition is nearing in the infant industry of space tourism.

Greason said that since various companies are offering different vehicles that will provide different experiences, "we thought it was time to let the potential travelers know what the options were out there so they can start thinking about what their plans need to be."