PM Visits Mojave's Burgeoning Private Spaceport

The sign at the entrance to the Mojave Air and Space Port says "imagination flies here." The motto fits this collection of World War II?era hangars and outbuildings with two control towers and four airstrips in the middle of the California Desert.

In 2004, the airport became a spaceport when a three-seat rocket-powered airplane built by a company called Scaled Composites and designed by its founder and CEO Burt Rutan became the first civilian-built craft to leave Earth's atmosphere. But Rutan and his ilk put themselves on the aerospace map long before SpaceShipOne took flight, and now they're trying to make Mojave one of the most important points in the growing commercial space industry.

Under Development

Recently we got to visit Mojave, where models of both SpaceShipOne and Voyager?the Rutan-designed craft that became the first to fly around the world nonstop without refueling?in the newly Legacy Park. But what we'd come to see was SpaceShipTwo, the new spaceship currently in development (though we weren't allowed to take pictures of it.)

The new ship has begun atmospheric test flights, launched into free fall from its WhiteKnightTwo mother ship at 50,000 feet. Both vehicles?SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo?were in various states of disassembly on my visit?the mother ship for its annual inspection and overhaul, the spaceship with its mid-section open to the ceiling, awaiting installation of its nitrous-oxide tank and solid-fuel rocket motor. Scaled is notoriously cagey about its test-flight schedule, but word is the spaceship could begin powered flights by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, another winged spaceship was getting ready for flight from Mojave: the Lynx, being built by XCOR Aerospace, which was founded by Rotary Rocket alums. CEO Jeff Greason, who doesn't like to tie himself to schedules either, says he hopes to see air under the landing gear by year end. So far the company has built and successfully test-fired one of the four identical 2850-pound-thrust rocket motors that will power the Lynx, is completing design work on the vehicle, and is awaiting delivery of major structural elements.

Where SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo rely on a carrier airplane to drop them from high altitude for launch, Lynx is designed to take off from the runway under its own rocket power. Engines powered by liquid oxygen and kerosene, providing greater efficiency than the SpaceShips' solid-fuel and nitrous-oxide mix, should make it possible. Like the SpaceShips, Lynx is designed for suborbital flight, just above 62 miles in altitude.

There's a vast difference in size as well. Think of SpaceShipTwo as a kind of space minivan, with seats for six passengers and two pilots. Lynx is more of a sports car, with room for only a pilot and passenger sitting side by side or a pilot and an experiment package.

The third class of rockets under development at Mojave includes the vertical takeoff/vertical landers designed, built, and flown by Masten Space Systems. The newest of the three companies we visited in Mojave, its founders (including former Bay Area IT engineer Dave Masten) were inspired to get into rockets when they stopped by the XCOR hangar during the SpaceShipOne flights.

Now this team of a dozen or so engineers and technicians is busy building a series of increasingly faster and higher-flying liquid-fuel rockets, each essentially a collection of propellant tanks, plumbing, legs, guidance system, and rocket motor attached to a metal frame. Their latest, called Xaero, is designed for flight to 5 kilometers of altitude (a little more than three miles) and return to pinpoint landings. Masten got on NASA's radar when it competed in and eventually won the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge. Now it, along with XCOR, Virgin Galactic, and others, is contracted for NASA-sponsored suborbital research flights.

Long Time Coming

Things don't come quickly in the commercial space race, and not all of the dreams birthed at Mojave fully take flight. Another model that dominates the Mojave airport is the conical Roton Atmospheric Test Vehicle, or ATV, which was designed by Rotary Rocket. Former military pilots Marti Sarigul-Klijn and Brian Binnie flew the thing on a trio of test flights during which the craft was lifted a few dozen feet off the ground by whirling helicopter blades tipped with rocket motors. It was to be the first series of tests of a new single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft. Instead it became the last when Rotary went bust.

Nevertheless, the builders at Mojave are an undeniably patient and persistent lot. Consider the newest project that will take shape there: Stratolaunch.

Nearly 10 years ago, Burt Rutan told Mojave airport general manager Stu Witt, an ex?fighter pilot with the patience of a desert coyote, that he wanted to build the world's largest airplane and fly high-altitude rocket launches with it from the airport. Witt set in motion a step-by-step plan to widen runways and acquire a possible hangar site. Then last month the moment came, when Paul Allen, the financier behind SpaceShipOne, announced that, you guessed it, Scaled Composites would build the world's largest aircraft under the name Stratolaunch and take off from Mojave for high-altitude rocket launches.

How did this come as a surprise after a decade of preparation? It helps to build in the middle of nowhere.

"What drove Orville and Wilbur to Kitty Hawk in 1893," Witt told PM, "was freedom from encroachment of the press, freedom from industrial espionage, and a steady breeze. The fact that we were able to keep this under wraps for nearly nine years says that we still enjoy the three elements that took Orville and Wilbur to Kitty Hawk."

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/news/pm-visits-mojaves-burgeoning-private-spaceport?src=rss

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