XCOR TRIP - 12 NOVEMBER 2001 |
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In November 2001, I used my newly issued multi-engine land ticket to fly to Mojave, California (the home of Burt Rutan's operation) to go to the unveiling of the Xcor Rocket-Ez. Xcor Aerospace are in the business of building rocket engines. However, unlike previous rocket engine designs, Xcor is designing rocket engines that are really re-usable - you can just put the gas in and go. As the Xcor President, Jeff Greason, said - what's missing from current rocket technology isn't performance - it's the ability to fly rockets like a jet engine. They are trying to design a rocket engine that can be used commercially.
The Rocket-Ez isn't a performance demonstrator - it's an operations demonstrator. It's basically a test-bed for their 400lb thrust rocket engines, so they can find out what it takes to run a rocket engine routinely. Xcor's eventual aim is for commercial space transportation - not just satellites, but to also commercially develop rocket technology that can get a human in space. A lofty goal indeed - and an exciting one! Government space agencies such as NASA have been sadly stagnating in recent years, and it's exciting that someone in the private sector has the drive and attitude to accept the risks and challenges of this kind of thing. Maybe there is hope for the human race after all :-) Xcor are not aiming at the X-Prize - they don't even mention it anywhere, and the X-Prize website doesn't mention Xcor - but I wouldn't be surprised if they are the first group to meet the X-Prize criteria.
I flew the Geronimo from Houston Gulf to Mojave with Jeff Richich and Mike King (Mike's my multi-engine instructor, and Jeff got his multi rating about 3 hours before I did). Apart from being the furthest west I had ever been in my life, my first contact with SoCal Approach, and probably the most flying I've done in one day (10 hours each way!) it cleaned my bank account out quite thoroughly :-) (No one said flying was cheap, let alone multi-engine flying). The trip was a lot of fun, and worth every penny. Below is photographs and video from the Xcor unveiling with some explanations.
The Flight - 16MB
download - 58 seconds of MPEG-2 (encoded at 2Mbit/s data rate)
The Whole Presentation
- 40MB download - 8 minutes of MPEG-2 (encoded at 500Kbit/s data rate)
MPEG-2 is viewable with recent versions of Media Player (on Windows) or VLC (on Unix). I've not used a Mac in a while, so I don't know what MPEG-2 software exists for it, but as it's a standard format, I'm sure there's more than one MPEG-2 player for Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X.
The company's website is http://www.xcor.com and contains more information, photographs and video of what Xcor is doing, including their recent demonstration on CNN (some good general aviation news for a change...)