Amazing: they appear to have asserted to clients that 35% of the ticket amount would be held in escrow by a third party trustee. Meanwhile, the trustee appears to be stating that the trust agreement doesn't reach this level of protections. If true, this would elevate the matter from mismanagement into fraud.
My impression is it was framed as a regular purchase, not an investment. Xcor owes them a full refund, and the only reason it won't happen is due to bankruptcy protections.
>>Jones, a commercial pilot who lives in Tulsa, Okla., said scraping together the money for the Xcor ticket was a sacrifice. “I live in an apartment. I don’t drive the newest car,” he said. “That’s a lot of money. You’re talking kids’ college or buying a house.”
That makes you a.......
It's his money and he should have gotten the ride, but then Chapter 7 is part of life for everyone included. If he tried to get some sympathy on the "scraping together the money" angle he gets none from me. $100K ticket to space when you have to borrow, move money left and right etc is not prudent.
If I had #200k to spend on a space flight, I'd put it in SpaceX. Give me a good suit, a couple of orbits and a way to land on the other side of the world, and back, and I'm in. I'd also entertain 'economy' re-entry vehicle options, for the hoots (as long as the suits good..)
Well, as soon as have a spare $200k to take a rocket flight vacation, that is ..
Nothing new. Pan Am sold tickets for their first flight to the moon for $10,000 decades ago. Everyone who bought one lost out completely when they went bankrupt.
As far as I can tell, no such tickets were ever sold [1]. There was a "First Moon Flights" Club that they ran that had about 100K members, but that was free.
> "..., there’s got to be a future in suborbital space,” Bennis said. “I want it to come in my lifetime.”
But, why? What possible benefit is there from a suborbital vomit ride? They're probably not even high enough to get the overview effect.
This is going to be the day of downvotes for me, but I can't see what good comes from strapping people in to a vehicle that gets less than 3% of the energy needed to get to orbit for a ticket price of $100k. None of the technical problems you'd have to solve would advance real spaceflight. It cannot be the space frontier dream of humankind to lob themselves briefly to 8 times the altitude of an airliner and then flop back down.
I'd have been embarrassed to have gone on that trip for that price, to the point that I'd have turned down a free ticket for fear of having given the impression that I'd paid.
"None of the technical problems you'd have to solve would advance real spaceflight."
That's just not true. Spaceflight is hard. There are many, many technical problems to solve. Just because you're not going to orbit, doesn't mean that you're not advancing the state of the art.
I'm a former XCOR investor. I supported them not for their suborbital program, but for their orbital vision [see e.g. https://spacenews.com/34930xcor-aerospace-makes-plans-for-re...]. The Lynx was a stepping-stone, a way of both funding their larger ambition and testing small parts of the larger system. The idea was to build to space as incrementally as possible, so as to be able to avoid the huge "and then we need $100M, and then it works or it doesn't" step that most space business plans have. Remember that the founding team had just come out of the crater of Rotary Rocket, which had one of those plans. Jeff Greason once said that if he could find a way to fly half a customer to space, he'd do it.
Unfortunately, there were still some lumps in the capital needs, the jump from engines to the Lynx was larger than expected, the Lynx took longer than expected, and the funding wasn't there. If they'd had another $20M, it could have been amazing, but that's a common refrain.
XCOR's plan was basically the opposite of SpaceX: rather than going orbital and then building in reusability, they started with total reusability and then wanted to bootstrap to orbit. Their goal was full airplane-style reuse, where you land, inspect, fuel, and go, and fly the same craft again in a matter or hours or minutes. They'd already demonstrated that kind of turnaround with their rocket-powered airplanes; I believe I saw a video of a sub-15-minute turnaround on the EZ Rocket. They'd also made engines that could withstand hundreds if not thousands of firings, and pumps that lacked the catastrophic failure modes and tiny tolerances of turbopumps.
Yes, I lost all the money. But it was worth a shot.
This was my reaction as well. What exactly do you get for the $95,000 price premium and the massive amount of added risk? Not even bragging rights, since even the most generous definition of "space" is 50 mi, not the 37 mi Xcor planned.
I agree 100%. I wonder if some people think there is an invisible boundary to "space" and when you're past it, gravity ceases to exist and you're just minutes away from bumping into Vulcans and Klingons.
Reaching an altitude of 60 km is just barely leaving the surface of Earth. Not at all impressive and totally not worth the time and hassle, never mind paying $100,000.
And yet they found over 200 people willing to pony up the money to do it. I agree with you in that I personally don't think it's worth it, but evidently others do.
Hell, people spend hundreds of millions of dollars on artwork -- I'd be much more inclined to do a $100k suborbital flight over that, and it's a drop in the bucket to those people too.
Yeah, balloon rides to the edge of space seem way cooler to me. Granted, you don't briefly experience zero-g, but the sensation of zero g doesn't seem very appealing anyway...
> 38 miles above the Earth ... high enough that passengers would feel 90 seconds of weightlessness.
What does this even mean? As I'm sure we all know here, there is in fact gravity in space near the Earth. Astronauts on the space station experience 0.89g at 200 miles altitude. You get a feeling of weightlessness by masking gravity with inertial forces, not by being far from Earth (I mean, being far from Earth would do it, but you have to be really, really far. Certainly further than $100k is going to get you). If you just want to experience weightlessness you don't have to go far from Earth at all. Just take a trip on the vomit comet for $5k.
Your point is taken, but I think you're being overly pedantic.
A parabolic arc with a larger height enables a longer period of weightlessness. You're welcome to debate whether it's good value for money, but the article's statement isn't wrong -- Xcor's spacecraft can (EDIT: theoretically) provide 90 seconds of weightlessness because of the height to which it travels. You can't replicate the same experience on the vomit comet; its service ceiling and maximum speed aren't high enough.
[+] [-] propter_hoc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aeolun|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkaye|7 years ago|reply
Honestly these things are very risky engineering efforts for an average person to invest in. Certainly not with cash up front.
[+] [-] alangpierce|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usrusr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JKCalhoun|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iseeyoubydesign|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dehrmann|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b_b|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] megaremote|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hedora|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onetimemanytime|7 years ago|reply
That makes you a.......
It's his money and he should have gotten the ride, but then Chapter 7 is part of life for everyone included. If he tried to get some sympathy on the "scraping together the money" angle he gets none from me. $100K ticket to space when you have to borrow, move money left and right etc is not prudent.
[+] [-] neonate|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fit2rule|7 years ago|reply
Well, as soon as have a spare $200k to take a rocket flight vacation, that is ..
[+] [-] ratsimihah|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostp|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rhacker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drfuchs|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blatherard|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/9656/how-much-di...
[+] [-] theothermkn|7 years ago|reply
But, why? What possible benefit is there from a suborbital vomit ride? They're probably not even high enough to get the overview effect.
This is going to be the day of downvotes for me, but I can't see what good comes from strapping people in to a vehicle that gets less than 3% of the energy needed to get to orbit for a ticket price of $100k. None of the technical problems you'd have to solve would advance real spaceflight. It cannot be the space frontier dream of humankind to lob themselves briefly to 8 times the altitude of an airliner and then flop back down.
I'd have been embarrassed to have gone on that trip for that price, to the point that I'd have turned down a free ticket for fear of having given the impression that I'd paid.
[+] [-] uranium|7 years ago|reply
That's just not true. Spaceflight is hard. There are many, many technical problems to solve. Just because you're not going to orbit, doesn't mean that you're not advancing the state of the art.
I'm a former XCOR investor. I supported them not for their suborbital program, but for their orbital vision [see e.g. https://spacenews.com/34930xcor-aerospace-makes-plans-for-re...]. The Lynx was a stepping-stone, a way of both funding their larger ambition and testing small parts of the larger system. The idea was to build to space as incrementally as possible, so as to be able to avoid the huge "and then we need $100M, and then it works or it doesn't" step that most space business plans have. Remember that the founding team had just come out of the crater of Rotary Rocket, which had one of those plans. Jeff Greason once said that if he could find a way to fly half a customer to space, he'd do it.
Unfortunately, there were still some lumps in the capital needs, the jump from engines to the Lynx was larger than expected, the Lynx took longer than expected, and the funding wasn't there. If they'd had another $20M, it could have been amazing, but that's a common refrain.
XCOR's plan was basically the opposite of SpaceX: rather than going orbital and then building in reusability, they started with total reusability and then wanted to bootstrap to orbit. Their goal was full airplane-style reuse, where you land, inspect, fuel, and go, and fly the same craft again in a matter or hours or minutes. They'd already demonstrated that kind of turnaround with their rocket-powered airplanes; I believe I saw a video of a sub-15-minute turnaround on the EZ Rocket. They'd also made engines that could withstand hundreds if not thousands of firings, and pumps that lacked the catastrophic failure modes and tiny tolerances of turbopumps.
Yes, I lost all the money. But it was worth a shot.
[+] [-] dehrmann|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpatokal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chihuahua|7 years ago|reply
Reaching an altitude of 60 km is just barely leaving the surface of Earth. Not at all impressive and totally not worth the time and hassle, never mind paying $100,000.
[+] [-] CydeWeys|7 years ago|reply
Hell, people spend hundreds of millions of dollars on artwork -- I'd be much more inclined to do a $100k suborbital flight over that, and it's a drop in the bucket to those people too.
[+] [-] computerex|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ummonk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ModernMech|7 years ago|reply
What does this even mean? As I'm sure we all know here, there is in fact gravity in space near the Earth. Astronauts on the space station experience 0.89g at 200 miles altitude. You get a feeling of weightlessness by masking gravity with inertial forces, not by being far from Earth (I mean, being far from Earth would do it, but you have to be really, really far. Certainly further than $100k is going to get you). If you just want to experience weightlessness you don't have to go far from Earth at all. Just take a trip on the vomit comet for $5k.
[+] [-] teraflop|7 years ago|reply
A parabolic arc with a larger height enables a longer period of weightlessness. You're welcome to debate whether it's good value for money, but the article's statement isn't wrong -- Xcor's spacecraft can (EDIT: theoretically) provide 90 seconds of weightlessness because of the height to which it travels. You can't replicate the same experience on the vomit comet; its service ceiling and maximum speed aren't high enough.