Esther Dyson’s Flight School

[Disclosure/context: I’m an investor in Xcor, the company that announced its Lynx rocket-powered, two-person vehicle last week.]

Last month I was invited to give the outsider’s perspective at XCOR’s press conference announcing the Lynx, which was fully covered elsewhere, including the Wall Street Journal and WIRED. Here’s what I said (slightly cleaned up):

When I was growing up, I fully expected to go to the moon. For one thing, my father had helped develop a nuclear-powered rocket, though it never got above 1000 feet. But I didn’t feel personally involved. The people working in space were a priesthood, either scientists like my father, or engineers and bureaucrats lost in large enterprises and government agencies. The ones with the most imagination ended up writing science fiction, like the father of two XCOR employees, Jerry Pournelle.

So I moved on to the world of personal computers and the Internet. The PC disrupted the old priesthood of computing, driving the price of computers by orders of magnitude down to where any fool – or entrepreneur or designer – could have his own. The Internet was even more disruptive – once it became private and commercial; it gave anyone who wanted a voice, for better or worse.

The same sort of thing now is happening with space: The Lynx is small and cheap enough that a private, venture-funded company can build it…and a surprisingly large number of people will be able to afford to fly in it. The one thing that is different is that the space marketplace is not transparent. Partly because many of the bigger start-up players are privately funded by billionaires who don’t need outside funding, and partly for other, less scrutable reasons, most new-space companies are intensely secretive.

That’s weird, because you could steal all XCOR’s plans (for one example), but you still could not build its rocket engines. That takes a combination of craft, engineering, testing…and black magic. (Plus a few patents, to be sure, many of them the work of Jeff Greason himself.)

So it made me especially happy to introduce Greason at a public announcement. Yes, there’s a fine line between openness and self-promotion; XCOR has perhaps erred a little on the side of excessive modesty. But last week, it came out engines blazing, with specifics, numbers and promises to which it will be held accountable. Flight tests should begin in 2010, Greason said. As for actual flights…”We’ll start flying when the tests are done.” Nothing is more sacred than safety.

So, though I am no judge of the technology, I am confident judging the company by the nature of its approach and the quality of the team, especially its leader Greason. Before XCOR and a predecessor company, he worked at Intel for almost 10 years and developed the process technology that made the Pentium chip series possible.

The company’s approach is incremental: ONE: Build the rocket engines first, and the rest will be easy. XCOR started with the E-Z Rocket, the first privately developed high-performance aircraft, which has now flown 26 test flights. TWO: Get contracts to fund your development wherever you can (including DARPA, NASA and the Air Force), so that you can pace yourself. And THREE: Promise less than you know you can deliver, even as you look farther out.

The Lynx itself

Of course, the Lynx itself is tremendously exciting, and it comes at a good time, when the market of private space travel seems slightly stalled, though not for lack of demand. Rocketplane Kistler seems out of the running, and Virgin Galactic’s timing is still unclear. From Virgin’s point of view, of course, a second (or third or fourth) source of launch capacity is little but a blessing. The Lynx promises a different experience from what Virgin does: one person strapped in the co-pilot seat at 37 miles above the Earth vs. a family floating but tethered in a somewhat larger craft, almost twice as high, at twice the price per person. That just helps to validate the market. There will be time enough for fierce competition later on.

More interesting, XCOR promises Lynx 2 one of these days…