My XCOR story on PopSci.com

Yep, it's a suborbital spaceship. Check out my story on the unveiling of XCOR's new Lynx spacecraft, along with embedded video, on popsci.com.

"Big announcement" coming from XCOR Aerospace

The folks at XCOR Aerospace tell me that the company is planning a press event on March 26 in Los Angeles. These guys are not prone to frivolous or gratuitous PR, so I'm most definitely intrigued.

Come to think of it, I don't think XCOR has ever held a press conference in the time I've been following them, since 2004. The engineers, technicians, and managers at XCOR prefer to keep their heads down, do their work, and let their deeds speak for themselves.

They've already built and flown a rocket powered airplane, a 7,500-pound-thrust methane rocket engine for NASA (through prime contractor ATK), novel piston fuel pumps designed to replace million-dollar turbo pumps in high-powered rocket engines at a tiny fraction of the cost, and built countless rocket engines to show again and again that liquid fueled rocket engines can be safe, reliable, and affordable enough to become part of our everyday lives.

But the company was founded to get people into space, and the founders have never lost sight of that prize, wrangling contracts from the Department of Defense, NASA, and private companies to build components of their planned suborbital spaceship as well as fund components of the ship for which they don't have customers.

A mysterious project has been underway on the XCOR shop floor behind a black curtain for some time now, and the company has been incredibly successful lately, with contracts and money rolling in faster than ever before. In fact, XCOR made Inc. magazine's list of 500 fastest growing companies in America last year.

Are we about to witness a new private spaceship unveiled?

I'm going to blog the XCOR press event for the Popular Science website at www.popsci.com. Look for a link from here on March 26.

Orion Propulsion wins space habitat contract

I've just had a note from Tim Pickens, CEO of Orion Propulsion, pointing me to the latest news posed on his company's website announcing a contract from Bigelow Aerospace. Orion will build thrusters for Bigelow's planned first commercial space station.

Bigelow's booming along on an excellerated schedule to launch its Sundancer space station by 2010. Orion's focus is on "selling shovels to the miners," as Pickens puts it, i.e., providing the means for other companies to reach space quickly and affordably to find whatever profits they may find there--or not to profit at all; Orion is also building thrusters for NASA's next planned crew launcher, the Ares 1, through a contract with prime contractor Boeing.

To get the Bigelow contract, Orion built and tested a prototype thruster and sent it to Bigelow along with a written proposal. Given Robert Bigelow's impatience with paper designs created at the expense of actual working hardware, that seemed a prudent move on Orion's part, but it also reflects the way Orion prefers to do business too.

Next generation space journalists weigh in

I got a call this morning from a group of high school students led by my colleague Graeme Stemp-Morlock at the University of Waterloo's Waterloo Unlimited program.

The students interviewed me and wrote a pair of articles, one of which I've posted here. Check out the other piece on Graeme's blog at http://www.graemestempmorlock.wordpress.com/.

The Family Vacation of the Future

You’ve been to Disneyland, and you’ve visited France, but where to next? For some, the answer is space. Currently, there are several private companies around the globe that are working towards making space travel available to anyone with the money.

It’s not just NASA anymore.

Before you rule out the trip based on the current cost of a suborbital trip, $200,000, Michael Belfiore, author of “Rocketeers: How a Visionary Band of Business Leaders, Engineers, and Pilots is Boldly Privatizing Space,” predicts that the price will plunge to the more affordable price of $10,000 within a few decades.

During orbital holidays in space, passengers would inhabit space hotels, proposed by Robert Bigelow, former millionaire real estate agent turned space entrepreneur. Encompassing the common characteristics of resorts on earth, these hotels will provide all your necessities and more. The view from your room will be out of this world.

Passengers would complete minimal training and basic medical examinations before departing on their space voyage. In contrast to the years of training NASA astronauts undergo, suborbital space tourists only need two days of training. This raises questions regarding how to handle an emergency when there is limited staff aboard the spacecraft.

According to Belfiore, space travel in moderation would not be excessively stressful on the passengers’ anatomy. Trips lasting longer than a few weeks, however, would increase the risk of bone loss, heart troubles and weakened muscles. However, researchers, not families, would be looking at these extended voyages and associated hazards.

Plus, who has that kind of vacation time?

By Paula Makela, Cathy Chen, Alexandra Dozzi, and Colleen Gilhuly

On Woodstock TV

I'll be on Woodstock's own TV station tomorrow at 6:00 p.m. Eastern Time as a guest on Bill Pfleging's Tech Attack. Tune in live at www.woodstocktv.org, and call in to join the conversation at 845-679-7777.

This is as close to home as it gets for me. The studio is just down the road from my house, right next to the playground where I walked my daughter during yesterday's break in the cold weather, and it's practically in the ball field where the Dalai Lama spoke last summer.

Bill's a good friend of mine, Woodstock's resident computer tech guru, and a fellow writer. He and his wife Minda Zetlin recently published a highly entertaining book about technologists' and managers' failure to communicate called The Geek Gap.

This will be a fun show, very informal, and we'll have a full hour to engage in some lively dialogue about cheap access to space, why geeks and suits have trouble understanding each other, and whatever else our callers want to talk about.

My desk

This one's for my friend Ben Zackheim, who wanted to see the results of the office overhaul I did at the beginning of the year.

Here's a little tour for those of you who are also interested:

Mac: After five-plus years, it was time to upgrade my desktop computer. I'd had such a great experience with my iPhone that I upgraded to this iMac. I do believe I have purchased my last PC.

Laptop: I'd already upgraded my laptop to this HP. Nice machine, great for watching movies, okay for traveling on assignment. Too bad it runs Windows Vista, the worst operating system I've used since Windows 3.1. It's counter-intuitive, locks me out of essential settings by default, required uninstalling a raft of craplets, and until I could figure out how to stop it, interrupted my work constantly to install endless updates and automatically reboot. I've had my Mac for probably a quarter of the time (a month and a half), and already I'm using it with much greater facility. And I've been a dedicated PC user since the days of DOS.

Office phone: Two lines, one for home, the other for Skype--which I use as a portable office line--keep the middle-of-the-night calls from antigravity researchers in Taiwan from waking up my family. I'm not joking. Skype interfaces with the phone through a converter box behind the video phone.

Video phone: This Ojo video phone displays full motion video with sync sound and requires no computer. Currently my little girl's grandparents are the only people I know with the same unit, so they're the only ones we can call on it. Looks like from its website that the company that makes it is going down in flames, so even that limited usage is coming to an end, making this a $300 paperweight.

Inspiration: The Alex Ross print of mild-manned Clark Kent pulling off the impossible transformation into Superman keeps me going through difficult deadlines. A cover for one of my PopSci stories, blown up and framed, features the enticing headline above the magazine title, "How Cannibalistic Spider Sex Can Make You a Genius," reminding me to keep my sense of humor.

Current reading: Michael J. Neufeld bills his 2007 biography of rocket pioneer Werhner von Braun as the most comprehensive treatment of his topic ever. He may just be right. More on that in an upcoming post.

My PopSci story on a hypersonic airliner

Check out the February Popular Science for my cover story on a European concept for a hypersonic (that is, faster than five times the speed of sound) airliner.

If you're like me and live in a town that doesn't carry PopSci in any of its stores (gripe, grumble), you can also click over to the website and read the full story there.

Interestingly, even though the editors specifically wanted me to pitch the airline as the ultimate in environmentally friendly transport, the A2's designers don't see it that way at all.

Yes, the jet runs on hydrogen, giving it an environmentally benign water-vapor exhaust, but the A2's chief designer, Richard Varvill of UK-based Reaction Engines, is quick to point out that there is presently no economically viable means of producing that hydrogen without releasing greenhouse gases.

This tendency toward optimism is something I really like about Popular Science. To be sure, many of our problems here on Earth are of our own creation, but, says the magazine each month, we're also smart enough to develop the means of our own salvation.