Up until a few weeks ago, it had been a pretty slow quarter (which was nice for a change). The past few weeks however, have been a blast (literally?):

I had the opportunity to tour the open-door areas of the Mojave Air & Space Port on November 19th. Among all the closed hangers, we did get a quick peak inside Scaled Composites, who looked to be working on Proteus:

Scaled Composites is the company that won the Ansari X Prize, aka TEN MILLION DOLLARS for the “first non-governmental organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks.” Upon their success, they immediately began contracting with Virgin Galactic to work on SpaceShipOne, SpaceShipTwo, and their respective WhiteKnightOne and WhiteKNightTwo (Virgin Mothership Eve) (Link). Unfortunately, Virgin Galactic declined our request to tour their facilities.

One of the few companies that did grant us access was XCOR Aerospace (the above pictured rocket engine is one of theirs). The engineers working in the XCOR workshop showed us a whole plethora of awesomeness, including the XR-5M15 7,500 lb thrust engine(watch the video, & turn up your speakers…) that they developed on a NASA contract. That particular engine was sitting on top of a file cabinet in their conference room. We didn’t get to see it running, but we did have the opportunity to see two much smaller engine tests (more on the scale of these, except much, much fancier). Our professor Marko Peljhan pointed out the quirky rotary dial that the engineers used to dial-in the burn time for the engine tests:

We got to peek around the shop for a bit, sit in a prototype cockpit of the Lynx Suborbital Spacecraft, and sit in the actual cockpit of the EZ-Rocket. The EZ-Rocket was their first rocket-powered vehicle, and the employees were all explaining what a joy it is to work for XCOR, because everyone gets a free ride (there are only seven employees). The Lynx is being developed to compete with Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. Virgin Galactic’s strategy is to fly the VMS Eve up to around 50,000 feet, where SpaceShipTwo will be released from the plane to complete the rest of the sub-orbital space flight, peaking at around 68 miles high (360,000 feet). Lynx, on the other hand, is an all-in-one package. And frankly, it sounds like much more fun. The Lynx is being designed to take off and land on a runway. However, soon after take off the pilot and passenger go nearlyvertical, like a rocket to get to their destination altitude of 330,000 feet (link). And it’s going to be powered by the XR-5M15 mentioned above:

You can definitely tell this isn’t a government run lab. They even asked before hand if anyone in our group was allergic to cats (because they have one that lives there..) And I’m a sucker for details. I wouldn’t be surprised if she ends up on the dashboard of the Lynx:

The following day I flew to Chicago for a long and fun week that consisted of a bachelor party, a wedding, my birthday, a huge family vacation, and the opportunity to visit some friends at Roots & Culture, and also at SAIC. My pals Alex Gartlemann and Jonas Sebura were commissioned by Ox-Bow to construct a replica Ox-Bowian cabin, and take it down to the NADA Miami Beach art fair. The cabin will be used by Chicago-based Bad at Sports to host a pirate radio station streaming art talks at the fair. Tomorrow is the last day, so stop by if you get a chance. (also, if you’re in the neighborhood, check out LikeArtBasel, where a friend of mine Sterling Crispin has a new video sculpture on exhibit.

Shortly upon returning back to Santa Barbara I had the opportunity to visit Vandenberg Airforce Base for a second time. We got to see a whole bunch of things that weren’t featured on our first tour, including a tour of the Joint Functional Component Command for Space. You know that room in any movie about NASA where a bunch of people are sitting in a room with a gigantic video monitor and talking to astronauts? This is one of the facilities where they do just that. We couldn’t take pictures inside, but there were a lot of fancy computers. Next, we had the opportunity to tour the Orbital Sciences lab where they were assembling a Pegasus rocket. This rocket is launched in a similar fashion to Virgin Galactic’s space ships, except it is much, much bigger. I took plenty of awesome photos of it, but I’m not allowed to show you. They use a plane called Stargazer to launch it, and they take off from the Kwajalein Atol in the South Pacific:

Next, we headed to the same launch pad seen toward the bottom of this post, except this time the pad was empty, which means we could take pictures (unlike the first time around when we were hanging out with a Delta II rocket and a team of engineers). We started at the bottom:

And then took a short elevator-ride to the clean-room at the very top:

And I was very enthusiastic to receive another small piece of very expensive tape (NASA approved clean-room tape..).

The last stop on our tour was to the museum again, where I was happy to acknowledge that XCOR’s control panel was a throwback to the earlier days of space-flight:

We also had the opportunity to purchase some exclusive patches, which they make for each mission. They had some really cool ones for the mysterious X-37, but this was my favorite: