Planetfest: Lynx vehicle offers a $95,000 trip to space
The Planetary Society’s annual Planetfest logically culminates tonight in a celebration of the Mars rover Curiosity’s landing. But the event is more than a viewing party; it is an interactive, family-friendly experience that seeks to bring home the prospect of space travel.
It’s also an opportunity for XCOR Aerospace, a private space technology company, to showcase its newest development: the Lynx Suborbital Spacecraft. The Lynx vehicle is designed to go up to space and back for a cool $95,000 a flight, allowing passengers to experience about three minutes of zero gravity. A model vehicle on exhibit draws attention from all ages.
XCOR Chief Operating Officer Andrew Nelson finished up a conversation with a 5-year-old space enthusiast who was in line to take a picture inside the model spacecraft. She complained about balancing her early bedtime with the 10:31 p.m. Curiosity landing.
“This is what it’s all about,” Nelson told The Times. “It’s energizing for us employees to interact and see the excitement around what we are doing.”
XCOR is one of many companies to make flights into space a possibility for people who are willing to pay their own way, although no company has thus far entered into service.
The president and co-founder of XCOR Aerospace, Jeff Greason, talked about his time at Planetfest and the Lynx vehicle:
What will your experience be like today?
I am here half with my family, half as CEO. I think this is definitely an exciting time, and we thought it would be a great crowd. It is fun seeing my children, who have seen the Lynx vehicle from the beginning of its creation, being experts on the vehicle and explaining it to others.
What do you think stimulates the public interest in space exploration?
That is a question that everybody asks wrong. The interest that people have in space is that they might find something interesting during their exploration. There is a threshold of opening up a frontier: future wealth, opportunities, living spaces. People want to be a part of it all. And that is my sense of what drives them [more than the exploration itself]. This is an exciting time, because society has moved from being interested in exploration to being interested in doing something about their findings.
What kind of person wants to use this vehicle?
Very few people are going for a thrill ride -- they want to be a part of exploring space or have heard about the few astronauts who have seen the Earth from space and what a life changing experience that is. Industrial researchers have less time to do their research, because they have to do it affordably and frequently to explain what they are doing. The vehicle gives those researchers an opportunity to do their work and makes the space environment interesting to them again.
