The XCOR Aerospace Lynx thrill rocket: PR image

Who would have thought that the announcement of a new rocket ride ‘thrill tip’ venture would lead to a lingerie collection?

Bare with me.  This is one of those stories that resembles a Jonathan Cleese sketch. It starts off serious and then lurches into insanity, yet the topic, joy flights into space, is not only serious but is an activity which is the curtain raiser, (but also panty lowerer)  to the era of mass space transportation.

The serious bit.  Xtraordinary Adventures, a Limited Liability company with an address in Boca Raton, Florida, is muscling in on Virgin Galactic and Armadillo Aerospace in the rocket ride game, which is where you pay somewhere between $95,000-$200,000 to ride a rocket the edge of space, variously defined by the companies as being between 61-111 kilometres above the earth, where you will also experience zero G for some minutes, and something like 4G at other stages, and possibly fear, terror, and on a bad day, incineration.

The risks aside, rocket rides are going to be a fantastic experience. You can die driving to work or catching a train, so get over it!

What is interesting, at least a first glance, about Xtraordinary Adventures is the flight profile.  The Lynx spaceship offers a single passenger ride with a space attendant and a space pilot comprising the crew, in a vehicle that is a rocket with wings that takes off like a conventional aircraft, blasts itself upwards into a suborbital trajectory, and then makes a controlled gliding landing at the point of origin, conveniently close to Los Angeles, from the early next year, after ‘thorough testing’.

The Lynx single passenger profile of a rocket ride to space

By comparison the Armadillo Aerospace experience  is a ‘traditional’ vertical launch of a rocket tipped with a viewing vehicle that will fall back to earth from its ascent into the outer darkness and using parachutes and finally thruster rockets close to the ground, make a soft landing.

The Virgin Galactic experience promises to be high theatre.

The six passengers per flight board the SpaceShip2 vehicle which is slung under a pterodactyl like lifter aircraft that takes it to a ‘drop’ attitude of around 16,000 metres  after taking off like a conventional jet except that it certainly doesn’t look like your usual airliner.

After only few seconds (one hopes) the rocket motor, which burns recycled tires kicks in and the craft soars into the high black yonder.

In five minutes of zero G weightlessness passengers can float around the cabin and choose a variety of  huge windows through which to gaze upon the blue planet.

The SpaceShip2 design has swept wings that work (or should work) like the feathers of a shuttlecock, stabilizing the vehicle as it screams back into thicker air, and pointing it in the right direction so that it becomes a controlled glider on its descent to Spaceport America in New Mexico, where the lifter has already landed and is being prepared for the next rotation of rocket ride thrill seekers.

The concept of a single winged sub orbital vehicle using runways just like ordinary aircraft is interesting. However there are a number of questions that arise from the new publicity push by Xtraordinary Adventures. One is that all of the supporting material in its on-line brochure appears to have been written no later than mid 2009, and refers to test flight starting in mid 2010 with first rides early in 2011. The original publicity drive three years ago was a fizzer.

However the website says the first test flights in a ‘thorough program’ will be in the middle of this year in preparation for first rides in 2012.

Curious thrill seekers who further check out Xtraordinary Adventures and its Lynx sub orbiter will then come across the less serious side of the web site, which flogs hats, pins, spacesuits (!) and small items of clothing.

Acting on a tip off from a serious US space contact, who said Xraordinary and longer established competitor Armadillo, were probably selling more space lingerie than rocket flights on  a typical day, Crikey signed up for the former’s offers and checked out Armadillo to discovered it had morphed big time into underwear retailing.

Apart from the Armadillo Space G string (illustrated above) in its Intimate Apparel section, there are links at the bottom of the page for those who didn’t catch other examples published in the unsealed section of the Crikey subscriber bulletin today.

Are we worried yet? The founder of Xtraordinary Adventures is described on its website as:

Mitchell J. Schultz, innovator, world traveler, visionary and recognized leader in the world of alternate finance, travel and media. He has also been active in charitable programs and fundraising for more than 40 years. Schultz is a certified SPACE TOURISM SPECIALIST and graduate of Space Tourism University 2010.

The Space Tourism University turns out to be a study program offered by Rocketship Tours, which is the general sales agency of Schultz’s company Xtraordinary Adventures.

Houston! We have a problem.