Space age cars
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In 2011 the company released footage of a lozenge-shaped preliminary test vehicle, New Shepard, taking off vertically, hovering at an altitude of 548 feet, and then setting gently down. Bezos poured millions of his $25 billion fortune into a venture called Blue Origin, operating out of an experimental launch site he created (with FAA approval) in a remote corner of West Texas. Visionary billionaire Jeff Bezos, the 49-year-old founder of, has spent more than a decade on a secret project to conquer space. The wing area is sized for landing at moderate speeds, near 110 knots-a little slower than that of an airliner during a landing.įly Again: Lynx's creators say the space plane will be able to make four flights a day.
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Landing: The space plane sheds speed by circling in a downward corkscrew. Reentry: Thermal insulation on the nose and leading edges of the wings protect the craft from the heat of reentry. The craft follows a parabolic trajectory in suborbital space. Takeoff: The space plane speeds along a runway under the power of four rocket engines.Īscent: The Lynx reaches Mach 2.9 as it speeds straight upward.Īpogee: The engines cut out about 3 minutes after takeoff. The first test flight may take place within months. Instead, the Lynx will fire its four custom-made kerosene and liquid-oxygen rocket engines to take off horizontally from a runway, as a plane does, and then climb steeply on its way to space. "It's going to be a real astronaut experience." Unlike capsules and other space planes, the Lynx does not need to ride another rocket to get into space. "You're sitting in the cockpit," says XCOR chief operating officer Andrew Nelson, turning the spacecraft's small size and two-passenger maximum into selling points. It is already selling $95,000 tickets on a 30-foot space plane called the Lynx. XCOR Aerospace of Mojave, Calif., believes it can offer the cheapest trip. Because a so-called suborbital space flight to this altitude requires much less energy than an orbital launch-about one twenty-fifth as much-many private space companies are devising ways to get science experiments and wealthy tourists there. There the atmosphere is so thin that, for most scientific purposes, it's a vacuum. Space is defined by a somewhat arbitrary number-climb above an altitude of 62 miles, the so-called Kármán Line, and an aircraft becomes a spacecraft.