Will This More Affordable Rocket Ship Take You to Space One Day? | Short Film Showcase
I want us to have a frontier in space. I want to live in the society that has a frontier, and if the only way to get that is to build it, then I'm going to build it.
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Out in the middle of the Mojave Desert, you will find the Mojave spaceport. Right off the runway is a company called XCore Aerospace, and they have a vision for what could be the world's first space airliner. This is Jeff Grayson, one of their co-founders. Like many born during the Apollo era, Jeff grew up believing it was only a matter of time before mankind, spearheaded by NASA, would begin colonizing outer space.
I don't ever remember not believing that there would be a frontier available to us in space. I don't ever remember not expecting that I'd get to work in it. There was this thing that we now call the space shuttle that was supposed to solve the space transportation problem. It is the worst disaster in the history of the American space program.
President Reagan has declared a week of mourning for the seven astronauts who lost their lives on their way into space this morning. Not only had NASA known about that problem and not fixed it; they had known about lots of other problems and not fixed them. That was really the moment where I said, it doesn't matter how much money Congress does or doesn't give NASA; this agency is not going to get me off this planet.
So I sat down and started writing business plans. The way to make money in space transportation is the same way to make money in any other kind of transportation. It's called the Southwest or alliance model: you keep the wheels in the wheel well. Every minute that is not in the air is a minute wasted.
How fast can we fly? How quick can we turn it around? How few people can we take to turn it around? It was a really cool idea, but before they could go and get investors, they had to prove that they could actually build a spaceship. Year after year, they kept plugging away, showing the world that they knew how to build rockets. Each success brought them a little bit closer towards their goal of building the spaceship they're calling the Lynx Mark One.
On average, NASA's shuttle traveled to space about four times a year. The Lynx is designed to go to space four times a day. We want transportation to and from orbit to be cheap, reliable, and frequent enough so that all of these things people dream about in space can actually happen. They can't happen right now because the cost is too high, the risk is too high, and you have to wait too long for your chance to fly.
But because it can do it with such a small ship, and because we can fly that small ship so frequently, the cost of doing each flight gets to be very low. My son was probably four or five when he looked at me one night and said, "You know, Daddy, is it really true that they used to go to the moon when you were a boy?"
It's really frightening that that question could even be asked. That's what a dark age is. A dark age is not when you have forgotten how to do something; it's when you forgot that you could. People look at things like going to the moon and they don't even know that that's a thing that can be done. We did do them. We can do them. We just have to decide to do them.
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