14 DAY TRIAL // According to officials at XCOR Aerospace Inc., it would appear the the suborbital spacecraft they are developing, called the Lynx, has just passed a critical mission milestone, when it managed to complete its first supersonic wind tunnel test.
The company is very pleased with the progress it's recording with the Lynx, which is being built to provide suborbital flight services to paying customers.
At this point, numerous corporations are going down this path, working on space-worthy systems that can take passengers up to the edge of space. There are numerous demands for such joyrides.
XCOR has been working together with NASA on its project, more specifically with the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), in Huntsville, Alabama. The wind tunnels here were really all that XCOR needed for this test series.
The main goal of the new flights was to determine whether the Lynx was of aerodynamically-sound shape, and whether any more fine-tuning remains to be done.
Telemetry gathered during this flight will be used to make final adjustments to the shape of the spacecraft, before engineers can move on to other objectives.
Assessing aerodynamic performances is very important for XCOR because Lynx will need to fly in a very stable and controllable manner through a series of very complex maneuvers that will be executed in a wide range of Mach numbers.
The measurement obtained from the MSFC wind tunnels will be cross-referenced to the ones the company obtained earlier this year from the US Air Force Research Laboratory, in Dayton.
XCOR, NASA and the Air Force are collaborating under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA). The company is directly involved with the Air Vehicles Directorate at AFRL.
“We continue to make excellent progress on the Lynx aerodynamic shape. The tests at MSFC gave us live information about the aerodynamic profile of the Lynx in transonic and supersonic flows, which occur during ascent and re-entry,” says Jeff Greason, the CEO of XCOR.
“We greatly appreciate the warm welcome and support we received at Marshall,” he adds, quoted by Space Fellowship.
“These tests complete another milestone toward delivering wet-lease Lynx vehicles and provide a great example of how government and commercial space entrepreneurs can work together to invigorate American industry and rebuild the Tier 2 and Tier 3 aerospace supplier base in our country,” adds XCOR COO Andrew Nelson.