It seems that the government-funded U.S-Soviet space race of the 1960's has morphed into a privately financed space tourism race of the 21st century.  XCOR Aerospace of Mojave, CA, is the latest private company to announce that they will offer commercial flights to the edge of space. XCOR said today that they will build a 2-person rocket plane, the Lynx, to take paid customers on a 37-mile high suborbital flight. The Lynx design reminds me of the never-flown U.S. Air Force X-20 Dyna-Soar orbital space plane of the 60s, except the Lynx appears to have a faceted canopy over the cockpit (doesn't look very aerodynamic, but there may be some structural and re-entry heating issues that warrant such a design).  XCOR has been developing new rocket technology since the late 90's, and in fact I met some of their engineers at the big Oshkosh air show in 2000. They made a presentation on their rocket technology, which features precise on/off control, to try and convince someone to fund them to build a replica of the rare WWII Me-163 rocket plane (scroll down on the link page to read the brief I wrote about XCOR). XCOR intended to use the Me-163 replica to showcase their rocket engine technology by providing a spectacular flight display at air shows. While no one ever funded them to build the replica Me163, I was impressed with their engineering approach and technical competency.  However, with the Lynx, I'm not quite sure how a 2-person, cramped cabin suborbital flight will offer much in the way of a space experience. Of course the launch and acceleration to the upper edges of the atmosphere would be a real kick-in-the-pants, and the view from the edge of space should be spectacular.  But it appears from the drawings that you don't have any room to float around in the small cockpit, so you can't really experience zero-g like is proposed on the Virgin Galactic sub-orbital flights.

What may be really telling about this rocket plane is that some of the funding is being supplied by the U.S Air Force Research Laboratory, which means that the rocket engine technology and any future Lynx variants probably have some military applications. I can't imagine the Air Force funding a high-performance aerospace vehicle just so private citizens can take a joy ride. The tourism angle may be a way to show civilian spin-off capability for the technology, and for XCOR to make some money on the side. Being only 2-person, it will be interesting to see if the Lynx offers any type of an emergency escape system, which is much easier to integrate into an aerospace vehicle when you only have a small number of crew members. Sub-orbital flight is still a relatively unexplored area of aerospace research for manned vehicles, so it might be a good idea to include an escape system during the early phase of flight tests until the design is proved to be safe and reliable.

At this point the Lynx is nothing more than a paper design with some slick animation (see below). XCOR hasn't announced a price for the flights, but they have said they intend to start test flights in 2010.