Last chance to sign up for the (lottery? raffle?) chance to win a free ride to the edge of space on the XCOR Lynx spaceplane. To win you have to attend the Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference, and you have to have an experiment. The best I can come up with on the spur of the moment would be to use the payload capacity of the Lynx to loft a high-performance upper stage, to launch an inert payload to as close to orbital velocity as possible, and test re-entry capability. My personal choice for re-entry vehicle? Khalid Sheik Mohammad. One thing we *all* want to know is “what happens to a human sans re-entry heat shield when de-orbited over the middle east?” and this seems like a good opportunity to find out.
So if you win the ride, feel free to use my experiment idea. I’d be happy to consult.
XCOR Aerospace and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) announce the final week to register and become eligible to win a suborbital research flight on XCOR’s Lynx I vehicle at the Next Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference (NSRC-2012) in Palo Alto, CA on February 27-29. The deadline for early conference registration and for entering the drawing is the 10th of February at nsrc.swri.org.