Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - XCOR's Lynx: Another Ride Into Space

Episode Date: May 12, 2008

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Move over, Virgin. Another rocket ship is coming. This week on Planetary Radio. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. Here and there across North America and in a few other places around the world, small companies with big dreams are struggling to build rockets that will carry you and me into the realm called space. One that is having some success is XCOR Aerospace. We'll talk with Douglas Graham of that Mojave, California company about their just

announced Lynx. It may be flying in just two years. Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, is gearing up for the May 25 landing of Phoenix on Mars. Emily Lakdawalla will tell us how much of Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft, will and won't reveal. And Bruce Batts will join me to reveal what's up in the current night sky. We've also got a T-shirt for our latest space trivia contest winner. Let's take a look at headlines from around our solar system, beginning with one of the prettiest landmarks on Mars. Emily's blog has pictures of White Rock,

taken by three of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's cameras. Go to planetary.org and see if you don't ooh and ah. Remember our show about the J2X engine that will bring humans back to the moon in a few years? NASA says it has successfully completed a series of tests. The space agency is also awarded a $263 million contract to build the Ares I mobile launcher. It will apparently be something like the huge crawler that has been in use since the Apollo era. Want to hitch your own ride to the moon on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter?

Okay, you can't go, but your name can. Find out how at planetary.org. Here's Bill Nye. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here, and I want to talk to you this week about PlanetFest 2008. This is where we all get together at the Pasadena Hilton in Pasadena, California from 2 to 9 p.m. and share the Phoenix spacecraft's landing on Mars. Now if you can't be in Pasadena, don't worry about it. Go online to planetary.org.

There's events all around the world monitoring this event, celebrating the exploration of Mars. But if you're in Pasadena, you can talk to me and Ray Bradbury, who wrote those fantastic books about Mars. And we can interview Peter Smith. He'll be on the phone with us. He won't be there because he's running the mission. He's the main guy. We'll land in the Arctic on Mars, the North Pole of Mars, on what we believe to be a big ice sheet of dry ice. And we'll bore down a little ways and look for who knows what. Who knows what we'll discover. Maybe there'll be water.

Maybe there'll be evidence of life that would change the world. And we will share this experience together on May 25th. It's a Sunday. It's going to be a fantastic day on Mars. Well, I got to fly. Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. It's hard to believe it has been almost four years since the first flight of Spaceship One

into space. I was in the desert that day as scaled composites rolled the White Knight carrier aircraft onto the Mojave Spaceport tarmac. A few hours before that flight, I had wandered onto the property of a company called X-Core, where they were demonstrating a small but very loud rocket engine. Now X-Core is flying its Easy Rocket airplane and is preparing engines for the Rocket Racing League competition later this year. XCOR has now announced the Lynx, its own entry into the space tourism race. I recently called company spokesperson Douglas Graham to learn more about

this new craft that promises a bargain ride for one passenger. Bargain is a relative term, of course, with upwards of $100,000 mentioned in other media coverage. Doug, thanks very much for joining us on Planetary Radio. Are you out there at the Mojave spaceport as we speak? I am. I had the best time out there a few years ago when I stopped by your place there, and it was kind of a party atmosphere. And I guess you guys had what you guys call the T-Cart engine. You were firing up every now and then, and boy, was that impressive.

Yeah, well, we've always believed in doing things step by step. We always believed the hard part of getting into space was having an engine that was reliable, restartable, reusable. And so the T-Cart engine was the first one we did, and we were just participating in the celebration of the achievements made in the XPRIZE. You've come a long way since then. You are flying rockets. You've got the Easy Rocket. You're working hard to prepare for the Rocket Racing League,

which I hope we can talk about a little bit. But the main topic today is this announcement of the Lynx, which is, I guess, XCOR's entry into the space tourism race. It is. It's a two-seater, and it takes off directly from the runway and goes up to the edge of space. No carrier aircraft. It's really what? I guess you'd call it single-stage, not to orbit, but to sub-orbit? Yes, it's a single-stage plane.

The reason why we chose that is a lot of people have used a two-aircraft system, your mothership and then the other one launching. Your neighbors there, right. Our neighbors, but others have also proposed it. And we felt that it was simpler. You don't have a separate entire aircraft to maintain. You just have the one aircraft, so it keeps the support levels lower, the amount of time and expense involved in keeping it flying a lot lower,

and makes the turnaround a lot faster. Well, when I was growing up, this was how spaceships were supposed to look. I mean, they might have had the wings they might not have, but there were no stages. There were no carriers. It was basically you fired up the engine, you took off, and when you landed, your ship looked pretty much the same. Right. Although most of them, they invasion, you sort of take off vertically

and you land vertically on the tail fin. And we chose the horizontal aircraft-like takeoff because it's a lot safer and likewise the landing. Because it means that at every step of the way if if there something does happen you can recover from it if you if you've just taken off and the engines don't work you just basically glide back onto the runway and if somewhere in your flight something doesn't work you can glide back you dump your fuel and you glide back so there's it's mainly an idea that makes it a lot more survivable, a lot safer, and it ends up also contributing to lower operating costs because of those factors.

And that's a big factor in this, isn't it? I mean, you guys are proposing to come in at, what, half or so of the price of a ride on that British billionaire's deal that's being put together with your neighbors there at the spaceport? We always, we actually, when we first entered this, we always figured we would not be first. And so we wanted to have something that was reliable and would have low operating costs. So regardless of who was first,

we would still be very competitive in the market in providing access to space. And now it may turn out there are any number of people that might be first, we would still be very competitive in the market in providing access to space. And now it may turn out there are any number of people that might be first, but we're still not basically putting all of our eggs in that one basket. And so everything was designed to be for low operating costs. Is the Lynx on track? I mean, you're hoping to make, is it just test flights or actual commercial flights within a couple of years? By 2010, we hope to have the first test flights. And then again, it just depends on how everything works and how long that process takes.

We're still raising money for it, but if money continues to come in at the present rate, we feel that we'll be in good shape in terms of raising all the required financing. Is there a key technology behind this? Is it the engine technology or airframe or some combination? Well, we always believed that in spacecraft, just like aircraft or cars, the engine's the real key. And so in some ways we're a little bit like Honda, where you build a great engine and then you can build a car around it. Well, we always believed that if you had the fully reusable liquid-fueled engines and you had them running reliably and consistently that gave you a fast turnaround,

that would be the thing that would make the rest of it possible. You guys have really been pioneers on, it is rocket science after all, in dealing with interesting and much safer fuels, including methane and I think kerosene. I wonder if you guys are going to be running on biofuels before long. Well, I guess in theory, if you use a methane engine, you could use, you can derive methane from all sorts of places, including from barnyards if necessary. Riding cows into space. Yes, cows into space. But the engines we're using, kerosene's actually been used a long time.

They used them in the Saturn Vs, for instance. That's true. I think even the V2, I think, was kerosene-powered, if I remember correctly. I can't remember, but I think so. Well, it's always been a good fuel for certain things. And one of the advantages is you can store it at room temperature so you don't have all the handling problems you have when you're using, let's say, liquid hydrogen. So the only thing we have, the real cryo difficulties of handling,

would be the liquid oxygen part of it. But it makes for a much simpler system. And it makes, again, it's non-toxic. So whereas if you have some of the hypergolic fuels, if you get them on you, you might get cancer or simply die. They're very toxic. If you get kerosene, it's not great, but you just wash it off and you're okay. So our system was designed from the beginning to make it easier for ground crews to handle it

and safer for the passengers or the people that would be riding in the spacecraft. And we should mention for those few people in our sophisticated audience who don't recognize the term hypergolic, that simply means you put it together with the oxidizer and it lights off by itself? Right. You mix the two chemicals together and you've got a fire. And that was used by a lot of people in the beginning because it's very simple. You don't have to have something that ignites it. It's self-igniting. But almost all of those fuels are very troublesome to handle.

So we picked something that we believe was more benign, again, safer for both the people, the ground and flight crews, as well as it's better for the environment. And, by the way, it's cheaper. So that, again, contributes to lower operating costs. Doug Graham of XCOR Aerospace building the Lynx spacecraft. More when Planetary Radio continues. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail,

informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. XCOR Aerospace hopes to be flying its Lynx winged two-seater spacecraft in just two years.

The company's Doug Graham is telling us about the plans for their vehicle, along with other work XCOR is doing out in the California desert at the Mojave Spaceport, where XCOR neighbor Scaled Composites is building Spaceship Two. There are some very pretty images on your website in a press release that I've got in front of me, and we'll provide a link to that on our site at planetary.org. There is also a little flight profile graphic, but I wonder if you can sort of take us through the experience that you might have as a paying passenger sitting next to the pilot of the Lynx.

Yeah, well, we always like to say that you get a cockpit experience with ours. You're not right. You're up there where a co-pilot would sit, not in back like cargo. And so you strap in for this front seat ride. They're on the tarmac. The engines go. You're going to be sort of jolted back in your seat a little bit, but it's a smooth burn. And you go for three minutes, climb, get a very high rate of climb, and then the engines cut off,

and then you sort of coast up to the apogee of the flight. And from there you can see the thin blue layer of the atmosphere above the Earth. You'll feel about a minute or two of weightlessness, and you'll see the curvature of the Earth. And then you'll begin the descent. And the initial descent, when you pull out of it, it's probably going to be the most jeez you'll feel. And then it's going to be long, circular, sort of glide back down to Earth. And, again, one of the safety features is if there happens to be a problem, the pilot can fire up the engines and make another pass around

if there happens to be a difficulty in the landing. And during that minute or two of weightlessness, are you going to still be strapped in? You will be strapped in. It's pretty cozy. It's almost like being the co-pilot of a fighter plane. You're going to be there side by side with the pilot, and there really wouldn't be any space to float around even if you unstrapped.

So you're going to be up there in the black. You're going to see the curvature of the Earth. You're going to be weightless. What do you say to people who are comparing the plans for the Lynx and this flight profile to something like Spaceship Two? Because you guys are talking about going up 60 kilometers, maybe 200,000 feet. And there are, of course, people who, you know, sniff and say, well, that's not quite space. Well, I mean, Rick Searfoss, who's flown the shuttle three times and commanded it once, he said it's still a space experience.

You know, if you go outside of the links and you're not wearing a space suit, you die. You're in trouble, yeah, right. Yes, so to us, that's pretty much space. And the thing is, the market's going to decide. And people will decide, are they willing to pay a premium to float around a bit and maybe be able to say they've gone a bit higher or not. And a lot of people may take both experiences because ours will be very different. You're right up there again, like where a co-pilot would be.

And that'll be a very different sort of experience. And the prices of the various rides, if you want to call them that, are going to reflect that. And the market will decide. People will say, I'm willing to pay this much to do this or that to pay the other one. I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of people that are going to want to take both. And Rick Sirfoss, we should mention, is your test pilot. He is. Are you building on experience here?

That's a pretty obvious question. I mean, you have had great success with the Easy Rocket. You're about to introduce what people will be flying around in the Rocket Racing League. It sure seems like this is a logical progression. Yeah, we're probably one of the only companies that you're working on a third generation of rocket-powered craft. The Easy Rocket, again, was built on one of Bert R companies that will be working on a third generation of rocket-powered craft. The Easy Rocket, again, was built on one of Burt Rutan's designs, the Long Easy, and it was a pressure-fed engine system. And then for rocket racing, the Velocity aircraft is used as the basic plane, so there's more of a load in it. We also introduced a significant technological

advance, pump-fed fuel. That means you can now use the fuel tanks, the wing tanks that exist in the Velocity, whereas before with a pressure-fed system, it would have blown them out. A lot of this technology is going to be used on the Lynx. So the Lynx will be the first where we'll not only be doing the engines, but we're actually going to be designing and building the airframe as well. There are only about 20 of you out there, I'm told. 22, 23. That's a small organization to be building spaceships and other stuff. I mean, you guys have all kinds of things going on. You've

developed this material called non-burnite, aptly named. Yes. Well, you can't set it on fire. I mean, it can eventually melt if you get the high enough temperature, but it's not going to turn. It's not going to burst into flame. And it's got some really interesting and useful qualities in terms of handling cryogenic materials. It's lightweight and durability will make wonderful fuel tanks for spacecraft. That's just one of the many applications we think can be found for it. And is that an example of the kinds of things that folks get into out there next to the tarmac in Mojave? This whole place is fascinating for the community.

It's a very small town out in the middle of the desert, and yet there's so much interesting stuff going on. Scaled is here, you have the Virgin Galactic, there's us, there's Mazden Aerospace, and there are other people out here doing very interesting and advanced stuff that doesn't happen anywhere else. It's sort of an incubator for space technology. And it is such fun. I sure hope that I can make it out there again sometime soon, and I would love to do that when you guys are going to be showing something off. I mean, are there going to be any public tests to the degree you can talk about this, about the rocket racing? We've already done some flight tests of the rocket racer.

And the Rocket Racing League, by the way, has announced that they will be flying our plane at Oshkosh this year. I did read that. So that will be something to see. And we hope we'll always have some interesting stuff for you to see, and you've always got an open invitation to come out and visit us and look around the hangar. I will be there. Had a great time last time and look forward to the next opportunity. Thanks very much, Doug. Take care. Doug Graham is a spokesperson for XCOR Aerospace out there, as I said, right next to the tarmac at the

Mojave Spaceport here in California, out there in the desert, where all kinds of fascinating things are going on, things that are going to make it possible for a lot more of us to make it out up there into the black. Well, we're going to go into the black in a different way, as we do every week, at least by eyesight, with Bruce Betts when we get to our next edition of What's Up. That's right after a visit by Emily. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, what fraction of Pluto will New Horizons see when it flies by? When New Horizons makes humanity's first trip to Pluto,

it'll be traveling far too fast for Pluto's puny gravity to slow it down and capture it into orbit. Instead, after a cruise taking more than nine years, New Horizons will zip by Pluto in an encounter period lasting only six months, after which Pluto will be a fading dot in the rearview mirror. It seems unlikely that there will be a return visit to Pluto by any spacecraft for many decades, if at all. So it may be heartbreaking to some of you to hear that New Horizons will not be able to snap photos of all of Pluto. The most important constraint on what New Horizons can see is the season. In July 2015, it'll be summer in Pluto's southern hemisphere,

and the sun will be about 50 degrees south of the equator. So as New Horizons watches Pluto rotate, about 17% of the planet, the north polar regions, will be in permanent winter darkness. However, all isn't lost for north polar imaging. Sunlight reflects from Pluto's moon Charon and bounces into this winter polar region, and New Horizons should be able to take photos by that dim light, covering the half of Pluto's pole that faces Charon. The other constraint is that Pluto takes about 6.4 Earth days to rotate, so about half of Pluto will only be seen at low resolution, half a Pluto day before closest approach, when New Horizons is still more than 3 million kilometers away. To summarize then, New Horizons will image about 40% of Pluto in

sunlight at high resolution, another 40% in sunlight at lower resolution, about 10% the winter pole in Charon light, and about 10% of Pluto won't be seen at all. Here there be dragons. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is on the telephone, and it's time for What's Up. We're going to check out the night sky and give away a T-shirt. Let's get started. How are you doing? I hear you saw Speed Racer with your boys tonight.

I did indeed. It was very speedy. Did you sing along? Well, of course I did indeed. It was very speedy. Well, of course I did. They never really played the theme song in its pure form, though. They had little snippets of it. Yeah, they had a very extended version at the end. No. No, sorry.

That Razor X, he's awfully cool. Yeah, who the heck is he anyway? I can't really go into that in deference to those who may wish to see the movie. Okay. Can you go into the night sky? I can. We can talk about Planet X, but you're not going to see that. So instead, go out in the evening sky, check out Saturn and Mars. Mars is pretty dim these days, but still up there.

Doing kind of a neat thing with Castor and Pollux, the Gemini twins. They were lined up. They're getting more askew now in their relationship, but it's closer to Pollux, and they are somewhat similar in color. And we've also got Saturn, I'm sorry, looking in the evening sky, you'll see that over in the west. And then if you look high overhead, you will see Saturn. And Saturn is hanging out in Leo, very close to its brightest star, Regulus. And they're different colors, and Saturn's kind of a yellowish. And you can check out in the pre-dawn sky or even the nice middle of the night. We've got Jupiter rising extremely bright. It will be off in the east-dawn sky or even the nice middle of the night. We've got Jupiter rising

extremely bright. It will be off in the east or very high up in the pre-dawn sky. Brightest star like object up there. Easy to check out. So that's what we've got going. Excellent. Thank you. On to random space fact. Mercury. Mercury, you know, has this gigantic basin, the Caloris Basin. On the antipode, this is also a vocabulary lesson, the antipode, the antipodal part of Mercury from the Caloris Basin, meaning all the way on the other side of the planet, you get weird terrains, jumbly terrains, to use a technical term, caused presumably by the seismic forces from that massive impact

focusing around to the Antipode and jumbling up the terrain. Listen, before you go on, I have a confession to make. No one, not one person has chosen to embarrass themselves on worldwide radio and Internet doing what you do with Random Space Fact. Not one. Well, I know I'm pretty intimidating. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, people just know that you're the master, and they're not going to challenge you on this.

They don't want to end up on the antipode of me. Yeah, so I don't know what's going to happen with that contest, but if anybody does want to try their own version of Random Space Fact, and if we air it, we will still give you a Planetary Radio t-shirt, so there. Now, we did get something from somebody else, a regular, John Gallant, who, if we hadn't already given him

a t-shirt, might be worth giving him one. He, let me read this to you. My wife and I drove to the Wolk Observatory at the Max and Marion Ferris Center for Observational Astronomy, and they took a picture at the entrance to the site, and we're going to have to post this picture. You know what they did? What did they do? They hung his Planetary Radio t-shirt over the sign at the site.

He said that he thought that was much better than hanging it over the world's largest urinal, which is at a facility near this astronomy club's place. And I couldn't agree more. That's true. Now, did he leave the T-shirt there? No, I think he probably picked it up. Okay. But I'm betting, you know, that maybe if other people wanted to either wear or drape their shirt over some site that would entertain you and I, and preferably something space-related,

we might be entertained enough to mention it on the air. And preferably not a huge urinal. Let's give somebody else a T-shirt. All righty. We asked you in the trivia contest what was the first spacecraft to get to the point where it was 80 AU away from us, AU being an astronomical unit. The average distance between the Earth and the sun are about 93 million miles.

What was the first spacecraft to reach 80 AU? How'd we do, Matt? Hey, we did great. And I'm happy to tell you that David Scurlock of Omaha, Nebraska, is a first-time winner with this Voyager 1, sure enough, a lot of people said Pioneer 10, thinking, well, hey, it got launched a long time before Voyager 1 and 2. But they were wrong, weren't they, Bruce? They were indeed wrong because Voyager 1 passed up Pioneer 10. Pioneer 10 was the farthest object away from us, but then Voyager 1, because it's going at a higher speed, eventually passed up Pioneer 10 and passed it up a while before it reached 80 AU.

Therein lie the trick to the question. Voyager 1 now and for the foreseeable future we're aware of will be the farthest human-made object from the planet off past 100 AU now. Go, Speed Racer! Go, Speed Racer! Go, Voyager! Go! Okay, how about next week? The LCROSS mission, NASA's LCROSS mission, will be launching late this year, along with the Lunar Inconnaissance Orbiter.

LCROSS is going to be headed off to the moon. And LCROSS is going to watch something slam into the moon. What is that something? What is that object that the LCROSS spacecraft will be following in to the moon? It's Racer X. It is Object X. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter,

and take your shot at a Planetary Radio t-shirt, hopefully before it impacts the moon at high speed. Iron Man? Good guess. Very good guess. You got until May 19, Monday, May 19, at 2 p.m. Pacific time, to get us that answer, and we hope you'll join in. Went down and saw the LCROSS spacecraft the other day, just getting ready for its thermal vacuum testing.

Very, very cool. Really? They're building it at JPL? No, Northrop Grumman. Oh, no kidding. Huh. You should have brought me along. I know. All right. They specifically asked, well, never mind. Yes, I should have brought you along uh my my fame precedes me obviously okay well anything else you need to share with us uh no i just want to wish everyone goes out there looks up the night sky and thinks about slinkies thank

you and good night he is bruce betts the director of projects for the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here for What's Up, and he'll be back next time to do just the same. A word of thanks and a tip of the Planetary Radio Space Helmet to university student Marco Tantardini. While he was with us, he did a great job of getting our little show on more radio stations all over the world. Marco is back in Italy resting up for his next internship at NASA's Ames Research Center. Grazie, my friend. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week. Thank you.