Financial reality of space business hits XCOR

[TexasTowelie]

Photo: HONS
This undated image provided by XCOR shows the XCOR Lynx, a suborbital horizontal-takeoff, horizontal-landing, rocket-powered spaceplane under development by the California-based company XCOR. Space tourism companies are employing designs including winged vehicles, vertical rockets with capsules and high-altitude balloons. While developers envision ultimately taking people to orbiting habitats, the moon or beyond, the immediate future involves short flights into or near the lowest reaches of space without going into orbit. (XCOR via AP)

A small, Mojave, California, aerospace start-up called XCOR Aerospace burst onto the commercial space scene in 2008 with plans to develop a vehicle that would rocket tourists into suborbital space.

XCOR won a few government and commercial contracts and, for a time, was seen as a rival to British billionaire Richard Branson’s space tourism venture, Virgin Galactic.

But then the financial reality of the space business -- that it’s much more capital- intensive than other start-up ventures, such as building a smartphone app -- caught up.

Last year, XCOR announced it would suspend construction of its Lynx suborbital space plane and lay off about half of the company’s workforce, which at the time numbered 50 to 60 employees.

Read more: http://www.mrt.com/business/article/Financial-reality-of-space-business-hits-XCOR-11717931.php
(Midland Reporter Telegram)

[longship]

1. XCOR's new model.

It helps if one supplies their own VROOM VROOM while Mommy or Daddy stands by.

[hunter]

2. Their LOX-Methane engines are sweet.

https://xcor.com/propulsion/main-propulsion/

Nevertheless I'm one of those skeptics who think humans have no business joyriding into space.

If you really want to do some hard core deep space exploration you ought to be working on Artificial Intelligence, maybe even genetic engineering of humans, should you be largely amoral and entirely fearless. (Some of your genetically engineered humans will "fail to thrive" in gruesome ways...)

The ideal explorer of the Martian wilderness and beyond can roll or walk around naked on the surface, no earthly "life support" needed. We've already built robots who can do that.

Book or movie, The Martian is fantasy. Space beyond Low Earth Orbit is a very hostile place for fragile humans.

It's likely our lunar astronauts suffered significant damage from high energy particles (cosmic and solar) on their brief visits to the moon.

[hunter]

4. It's not going to stop?

It's hardly happened.

When's the last time someone has walked on the moon?

Lack of data, small sample size, yes.

But there's this:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep29901

Mars is some even deeper shit.

If we humans can send some AI poet to Mars, Pluto, or beyond, one who can taste the dirt and watch the sunrise and tell it in words I understand, then that's a win for me. I'll never demand explorers be my same flavor of meat.

[hunter]

6. The sample size is small. I suspect the larger it gets...

... the worse it will look for meat people.

Should our world civilization (version 1.0) survive, the universe beyond earth will belong to our intellectual children, not our biological children. I'm okay with that.

My own answer to the Fermi Paradox is that this universe is saturated with intelligent life, we just can't see them.

Maybe our intellectual offspring will.