For the
last eight years privately held XCOR Aerospace Inc. has taken a slow,
methodical approach to achieving its vision for reusable orbital space
transportation.
"It has
been a hard slog and continues to be a hard slog. It's just that we're getting
results from that slogging," said Jeff Greason, XCOR's president and
co-founder. "Every six months we look around and we're a little further along."
Working
from its desert base at the Mojave Spaceport and Civilian Aerospace Test Center
in Mojave, Calif., XCOR has focused on research, development and
production of reusable rocket-powered launch vehicles for horizontal take-off
and landings -- initially on suborbital flights, but with an eye towards an
eventual capability for orbital launch operations.
Comparing
his return on these technology investments to compound interest in banking
terms, Greason said in an April 12 interview that XCOR started very small and
has made step-by-step progress, first on engines, and then on tanks, and then
on pumps and valves.
Xerus
suborbital vehicle
Now the
hardware and funding is coming together to enable the development of the initial
suborbital vehicle, to be known as Xerus, Greason said.
Xerus is
envisioned as a one pilot, one passenger suborbital spacecraft that would
depart the runway under rocket power and glide back for a runway
landing, retaining some fuel for approach and touchdown maneuvers. "We have
been working for some time on that vehicle. It's moving more and more off the
back burner onto the front burner," Greason said.
Greason
said the company's goal for Xerus operations is to support a set of different
suborbital markets: Handling suborbital passenger flight, carrying scientific
equipment above the Earth's atmosphere and providing microgravity for
payloads. Not necessarily at the same time period, Xerus would also be
outfitted to lob small payloads into Earth orbit, he said.
XCOR
announced April 11 that it has been awarded a nearly $100,000 Small
Business Innovative Research Phase 1 contract as part of the Air Force
Research Laboratory Air Vehicle Directorate's Operationally Responsive Space
Access Mission. Utilizing government and private funding, XCOR plans to design
a simple, all-rocket powered vehicle that will fly low altitude suborbital
demonstration missions. This vehicle would provide the Air Force with a flying
test bed to appraise factors that drive operational responsiveness, the XCOR
press release stated.
Race track
in the sky
XCOR is also busy at work on liquid oxygen/methane rocket engine
technology. Test firings of the engine have been carried out in Mojave --
conducted as part of a $3.3 million subcontract XCOR has with Alliant
Techsystems.
In another
project, XCOR Aerospace is actively working on the X-Racer for the
Rocket Racing League, an aerospace sports and entertainment organization
promoting rocket-powered aircraft races. These liquid-oxygen- and
kerosene-powered vehicles are to be flown by pilots through a 3-D race track in
the sky at various venues throughout the world.
The X-Racer
is a very modest technological step beyond XCOR's
EZ-Rocket, Greason said. The piloted EZ-Rocket was the firm's early
technology airplane demonstrator for its future vehicles. The EZ-Rocket and its
rocket engines were developed from paper to flight in nine months, taking to
the air 26 times as well as demonstrating a three-hour turnaround time
according to the group's Web site: www.xcor.com.
The big
technological stretch for the X-Racer is a radical improvement in turnaround time,
Greason said. While the EZ-Rocket was designed for 24-hour turnaround, the
X-Racer turnaround target is a brisk 10 minutes, he said.
"That's a
big stretch. We've done some laboratory demonstrations that convinced us that
kind of turnaround was possible. Nothing we've seen so far has led us to change
our mind about that," Greason added.
Experiment
heavy Greason said XCOR Aerospace has grown considerably over the last 18
months, with the size of the company doubling to a staff of 35 people. Along with
working through the prospects of getting a new facility built in Mojave, the
firm is on the lookout to add both an aerodynamist as well as an aircraft
structural designer, he said.
"Right now,
Mojave is just the place to be if you're a company in this emerging industry,"
Greason said. "We are very 'experiment heavy' and that's continuing to be a key
to the way that we do business," he said. Greason said the company takes pride
in its approach, which is to deliberately shorten the time between experiments
and developing operational equipment -- a conscious effort to avoid studying new
ideas to death.
That
approach is summarized in XCOR's motto: "first make it work ...and then make it
work better," Greason said.
"We are
really pleased that we can offer good jobs to the local high school graduates
as well as highly trained engineers from all over the country," said Aleta
Jackson, co-founder and manager of the company.
"Now that
we have the resources to provide good pay and medical benefits, I think we can
stop calling ourselves a 'new start.' We are a young aerospace company, and I
hope we continue to use our fresh outlook on everything we do."
Understated
approach
Rich
Pournelle, XCOR's director of business development said small aerospace companies
are seeing some encouraging trends for the better. For one, the computer power
needed to carry out rocket and engine fabrication, including computational
fluid design, is now affordable for small firms.
"The point
is ... you can do significant technical work with a small team," Pournelle said
in an April 12 interview with Space News. "The amount of work that five to 10
people in a garage can do nowadays is incredible."
Another
favorable trend has emerged within the area of supply chain management. Small
space companies can have a lean inventory process and don't need to have a
warehouse full of parts. Finding a specialty supplier of a needed rocket part --
say a cryogenic valve, for example -- is just a Google search away and a
next-day mail delivery, Pournelle said.
Another
trend working in favor of small companies stems from the savaging of the U.S.
industrial base and the relocation of manufacturing overseas, Pournelle added.
Machines, tooling and other hardware that at one time cost hundreds of
thousands of dollars, he said, now can be obtained for pennies on the dollar.
Previously,
investment in start-up space companies was spotty at best, Pournelle said, but
now things are picking up. In the grand scheme of things, however, the private
space industry is very new and very young, he said.
"We've
tried to take an understated approach to marketing the company because there's
been such a history of companies making wild promises ... and then leaving a big
crater afterwards," Pournelle said. "We'd like to develop more relationships
with a lot of the primes, he continued, modeled after the successful
relationship with Alliant Techsystems.
In looking
out five to 10 years, where does XCOR Aerospace plan to be? "In orbit," is
Greason's quick, matter-of-fact response. "I think in the next few years we're
going to see multiple entrants get suborbital vehicles into service...but there
are steps beyond that. In general, our plan is bigger, higher and faster."
