If XCOR achieves the turnaround time in the Economist article on suborbital adventure travel that Rand spotted of 4 flights per day, that puts them with higher capacity per plane per day than Rocketplane's 3. (Full disclosure: I have business dealings with both firms.) Assuming that their two-seater does not take more people than Rocketplane's to service, that should give them a revenue advantage in a Boom town scenario and a cost advantage in the Dullsville scenario. If Xerus indeed costs only about $10 million to develop vs. more than $40 million for Rocketplane (according to Chuck Lauer at ISDC), then they will have lower implicit interest costs too. Number of lifetime flights and flights per major overhaul are interesting questions that will also factor in. Since neither plane has flown, a 33% difference in servicing time per passenger is quite speculative at this point, but interesting.

This cost/revenue disadvantage per plane won't be a problem for Rocketplane if it can fly 100 flights of 3 passengers in their first year and earn $60 million before any of the competitors can bring their planes on line (although Carmack is optimistic he will start flying next year according to what he told me at Space Access).

In a boom town scenario, RLI, Virgin, Armadillo, Blue, Masten, SpaceDev, XCOR and probably a few new players will all build more craft than they were originally anticipating. This will result in lots of business for the low cost/high value player, but probably several bankruptcies or mergers eventually.

(Cheshire cat grin)

No other comment...

Wow, 4 flights a day...and think, it was only 30 years ago NASA was promising 30 flights a year. Just what are we sending into space 4 times a day? Zero G tourists? We live in a world that could not make the Concorde profitable, suddenly we are going to find sufficient millionaires to fill 4 flights a day? I think not.

Just wait until at least one of the COTS capsules is flying, too.

Proceed directly to orbit. Do not collect suborbital $200(,000) dollars.

Nothing was ever going to make back the vast sums a government project spent on developing the Concorde, but it was aparently making money on operations until the planes got old and fewer people flew them after 9/11.

Concorde had two huge problems. It wasn't allowed to operate over land due to the sonic booms all along the route, and it only had enough fuel to bang its way through the air across the narrowest of the world's oceans. Doug and his friends are going to solve both problems by going around the air, not through it -- and by not spending umpty-brazillion dollars building it in the first place.

> Just wait until at least one of the COTS capsules is flying, too.

> Proceed directly to orbit. Do not collect suborbital $200(,000) dollars.

Right. Why would want a safe, affordable trip into space when they can bankrupt themselves paying for a ride in a suicide capsule? :-)

Just what are we sending into space 4 times a day?

For many launches, just the vehicle itself, until the test flights end. There's no other way to get real reliability than to fly the hell out of the thing.

No law that says every launch needs to be people. They can also launch experiments.

Mike, I agree with you and Paul about launching without people. I specifically agree with the concept of building reliability data by just launching the system regularly. However, besides testing the system, how many extraneous experiments are really practical in a suborbital profile?

> suddenly we are going to find sufficient millionaires to fill 4 flights a day? I think not.

Don't forget Dullsville. If maintenance and capital expense is 1/3 less per passenger, then they can charge a lot less (or provide more value added service) and make a profit even if the market is disappointing and open up space to non-millionaires. Maybe XCOR will only make a modest return instead of an extraordinary one in Boomtown, but that is enough to survive.

Again, this assumes other things are all equal and is in any case just an intellectual exercise until actual fulfillment, maintenance histories and flight rate data are gathered.

The other thing about Xcor and Dullsville (hm - not sure those two belong in the same sentence) is that they are going the internal growth route (as in not taking on debt to achieve this). That means that disappointing results do not shut them down, it would just be a learning experience. They would adjust operations to match the market and move on.

As an aside, if you consider the Concorde as the closest animal (which is probably true - I bet most people took the Concorde as an "experience") then each Concorde flight is equivalent to about one month's operation for Xcor. I believe the Concorde may have flown more than once per month.

The size of the experiential market is unknown, but at a minimum I would expect it to provide 1000 people a year. That's just not a lot of people!

1000/year as a start would be $200 million a year at $200,000/seat or more than enough to pay off Rocketplane, Virgin and XCOR's investments in the first year of each of their flying respectively(albeit not New Mexico's for a while). With Virgin's $13-14 million in presales with SpaceShipTwo still on the drawing board, that is pretty good validation that there is some market.

Dullsville is more like 160/year total for all vendors ($32 million/year at $200,000/seat). Deaths might put us in this scenario. Everest has about 160 successful sum*mits per year (out of 640 attempts) and about 10 deaths per year or 1.8% of attempts. 50 flights per crash would be an atrocious safety record (about like shuttle) and would likely drive up the price due to addtional regulation. The manufacturers appear to all be going for at least hundreds or thousands of times safer than shuttle for making customers happy and cheap reuse.

A crash for an early stage startup that results in a fatal accident for a customer would have to have a pretty good explanation to avoid putting the manufacturer out of business (e.g., meteor strike) and would certainly damp demand across the industry. Certain kinds of crashes would damp demand more than others. E.g., a design element that is not present in all designs would damp demand most for the operators that used the relevant design.

My advice to XCOR is to haul HS and College student experiments during their shakedown flights if possible where empty space permits. There has to be a tax write-off in there somewhere.

XCOR.

It's X C O R.

All caps. No small letters. No dots. Nonsense word.

Thank you. :-) :-)

Don't count your chickens until they are hatched.
Neither organization has done much yet.