![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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May 2023
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