Chuck Lauer is giving a status on Rocketplane. Showing the latest version of the XP.

Past year has been difficult, and financial situation has not gotten any better — primary challenge in wake of COTS debacle has been financial, not technical.

Five spaceflight participants, single pilot, two plus two plus two seating, each person gets two windows and video monitor. Using kerosene for turnaround and allows jets and rockets to use same fuel, which allows diversion of rocket fuel to jets in emergencies. Using derivative of Atlas sustainer engine. Turbopump engine with peroxide monoprop for pump. Similar to SpaceX engine, which is legacy from FasTrack. Affordable proven technology. Need peroxide anyway for RCS. Has high flight reliability with benign failure modes and shutdown. Abort modes and safe shutdowns are key to passenger safety. Provides automatic shutdown with health monitoring. Only dump LOX in event of shutdown and fuel is transferred from fuselage to wings. Carry light load of jet fuel, but in event of problem, use rocket fuel for jet safety margin. Using J-85 jet engines, still flying, still supported. Afterburning for takeoff performance and to allow higher altitude before lighting rockets which improves overall system performance. Uses electromechanical actuators. All-electric fly-by-wire system. Peroxide RCS provides full three-axis control. 309 seconds Isp which is pretty good without staged combustion.

Multi-function displays for cockpit. Paragon building ECLS for non-suited cabin. Believe strongly that pressure suit detracts from experience. Also there are failure modes where pressure suit actually introduces hazard. Will provide necessary redundancy to persuade FAA that they can safely fly without pressure suits. Experience will be captured on built-in cameras, though passengers can bring their own.

Doing wind-tunnel tests, and have one more run to do before designing flight-control system.

View from Oklahoma provides views from Rockies to Gulf of Mexico. Thinks that clouds detract from flight experience, so scratching head over flying from northern Scotland. Have hired designer who has worked for BMW and others for quality interior and comfort.

Thinks that non-passenger, non-tourist market is significant for them and the entire industry. Ames doing good work, but need to update Futron study to better understand suborbital market. Thinks an update could be done for a hundred thousand or so. Ames is showing that we can do other things with these vehicles. Showing picture of standard rack in vehicle after seats have been pulled out. Should be able to swap out passenger seats for mid-deck lockers to whatever degree necessary to fly combination of experimenters and experiments. Working with media sponsorships, selling rides to others who give them away for marketing purposes. Have seen increase in sales by space-based ad campaign.

Also have applications for external stores for either launching satellites or sensors. Astronomy community interested in observation in bands that don’t get through the atmosphere. High-fidelity astronomy and remote sensing. Can put a lot of equipment on if passengers and seats removed. Working with Hawaii for first FAA-licensed point-to-point corridor, from Kona to Oahu. Hawaii sees this as analogous to digging channels in Honolulul for flying boats in the thirties, to enhance tourism industry. Combining real-life spaceport with virtual reality all the way out into the solar system. Sweden, UAE, Singapore, Hokkaido also interested. Awareness growing internationally, and expects going from first to second generation vehicles with one-hour ocean hops (Mach 10). Growth from suborbital to orbital separate discussion.

His efforts focused totally on suborbital now, and it’s much cheaper than orbital. Thinks they can do suborbital for hundred million. $28M invested so far. Orbital (Kistler) not dead, and restructuring to find the money. Price increases have made them more viable. They were first canary in the coal mine looking for capital when everything was shutting down. Order book that NASA has now is four times what it was in COTS 1, and if they’d had that then, they could have raised the money. $220M per launch for cargo is a nice market, and they think they could be flying the first reusable system to go after that within three years of funding. K1 is not dead, and when you look at Bigelow and non-NASA markets the business case can be made once the money starts flowing in the financial markets again.

The Friday post-dinner panel consists of Clark Lindsey, Henry Spencer and Dave Salt, talking about what’s going on in NewSpace outside of the US.

Clark starts by defining it as innovative small ventures with an emphasis on lowering costs of space access. Most of them are private.

Europe/UK’s most prominent one is Virgin Galactic. Anchor tenant for Spaceport America and trying to operate out of other spaceports.

Dave Salt notes that they may be teaming with Surrey satellite to use WK2 as a first stage to get to orbit. They have propulsion systems but could use a launch platform. Notes that Surrey is owned by EADS.

Now talking about Star Chaser, who haven’t launched much lately but had some launches a few years ago and are doing engine testing. Dave notes that ESA has been looking at Star Chaser, and is interested in space tourism, but is very cautious about it, and there’s nothing significant going on at the moment.

Next company discussed is Reaction Engines. Henry Spencer says that for those of a certain age, Skylon looks like Fireball XL-5.

Talking about the STERN project, which is collaboration between a university and Reaction Engines on an altitude-compensating nozzle.

Notes that Surrey Satellite is an example of how a small company can outdo a big company. Henry says that ESA and others behind Galileo came to the realization that their frequency reservations were about to expire because they hadn’t gotten anything into the sky. They put out an RFP for a placeholder/satellite, and expected only one response from the Galileo Industries consortium, but they got a second bid from Surrey that was a whole lot cheaper. They compromised by giving both bidders money. Surrey got its modest request to build JOVI A, and the other company got three times as much to build JOVI B, and GI said that it was a waste of time because they would launch first anyway. Surrey came in on time and within budget, while GI overran and ran behind. Surrey got a second contract as a backup in case GI’s launch failed. GI collapsed from embarrassment, to the amusement of the observing NewSpacers. Unfortunately, Surrey has since been absorbed into EADS.

Discussing Project Enterprise, a continental NewSpace company that is going to be talking tomorrow.

Dave Salt suggesting that we shouldn’t include the EADS space tourism venture because it’s so much larger (even though there’s no rational business case for it). He’s talked to one of the principals who is still behind it, but Dave’s not sure whether it’s alive or really dead, or just resting.

[Update after discussion]

I got distracted and waylaid just after they finished up the UK, so I missed the rest of the globe. But I expect that Henry Cate will pick up the slack. He’s been putting me to shame this weekend.

I gave my talk about 10 AM. The briefing can be downloaded here. Clark Lindsey and Henry Cate blogged it.

I should note (and I appreciate that he was in a hurry) that when Clark writes:

EELV- drop in number of commercial flights expected raised marginal costs because of low flight rate.
— Wiped out savings from hardware improvements.
– Expendables have high marginal costs
– Reusables have low marginal cost IF they have high flight rates.

The drop in the commercial flight rate didn’t increase EELV marginal costs, it increased average costs (which are what the price has to be based on, other than loss leaders for marketing). If you price below your average cost, you’ll lose money. Increasing rate doesn’t help, because you can’t make it up in volume.

Similarly, reusables have low marginal cost regardless of flight rate. Increasing flight rate reduces average cost per flight, allowing it to approach the marginal cost as the rate increases.

I’m still having a gumption shortage for focusing and posting, but Clark has notes on last night’s session, here, and here. Michelle Murray of FAA-AST is talking right now about the the amateur rocket rules, and Clark has more links on that subject as well.

Henry Cate is conference blogging as well. Just keep scrolling.

I’m not sure whether it’s her way of celebrating April Fools Day, but Robin Snelson (aka “Rocket Sellers” in Second Life) decided to start a new blog.