Andrew Reiff

National

Summary- New rocket aims for space tourism market

Xcor, a rocket company, plans to begin test flights of a new reusable rocket ship in 2010. The rocket takes off and lands like an airplane but has four large liquid oxygen engines to carry it to around thirty-seven miles into the atmosphere. It only holds one passenger at a time but can make up to four flights a day. The company did not say how much a flight would cost, but it is bound to be competition for Virgin Galactic, another space tourism company that unveiled a model of SpaceShipTwo this year. SpaceShipTwo piggy-backs on another plane and then releases from high in the air and goes to around sixty miles up from Earth. It also carries six passengers but can only make one flight a day. SpaceShipTwo is going to be test-flown this year.

Opinion-

Good for Xcor, I think, because they will only be an example for the mighty force of Richard Branson and Scaled Composites. So SpaceShipTwo is planning to be operational as early as next year, and this Xcor thing is going to test-fly in 2010? By the time the Xcor rocket comes out, SpaceShipTwo will already be the most trusted (and only) name in galactic tourism, and the Xcor rocket will look bad by comparison. On SpaceShipTwo, the passengers can actually get out of their seats and float around for around ten minutes, but on the Xcor rocket you will experience weightlessness but not be unstrapped. So yea SpaceShipTwo is much better than anything else in the works. But thanks for trying!