John Johnson, who I saw out at the test site in Mojave on Wednesday, has a story about the Masten feat at the LA Times today, illustrated with a photo by XCOR’s Mike Massee. My only problem with it is that he understates NASA costs:
NASA’s next-generation rocket, the Ares 1X, which was test-launched Tuesday, has cost tens of millions of dollars. Xoie and her predecessors have cost about $2 million.
Actually, while it’s technically true that Ares 1-X cost “tens of millions” (over forty tens of millions), it would be more accurate and less misleading to say that it cost hundreds of millions. Not to mention the fact that it flew Wednesday, not Tuesday. Tuesday was the originally scheduled launch date, but it was delayed until Wednesday.
So much for those much-vaunted “layers of editors and fact checkers” at the Dog Trainer.
Another non-fact their layers of checking missed:
> NASA’s next-generation rocket, the Ares 1X
No, 1-X was a sound and light show for the gullible. The only thing it has in common with Ares 1 is the SRB casings….
A bit off on the previous day’s story as well: he reported that Xoie landed in flames, when a single viewing of the YouTube video would have showed him that the fire didn’t start until she was already on the ground.
The bit about how Xoie and its predecessors cost $2M is also a bit misleading. I came up with the idea for Xoie back in…looking at email it looks like the first time we were seriously discussing my concept for Xoie was late May. Total cost including the fully burdened rate for all of our time, as well as all the hardware/fabrication costs is probably just around $200k for Xoie, and that’s without splitting the design cost over the two airframes we’re building. Doing that it was closer to $150k vehicle.
FWIW. Most of that “approximately $2M” was spent getting us up the learning curve to the point we could actually try building competition vehicles this year.
~Jon