XCOR wins South Korean Space Center Contract

...based on their history of successful flights?
Near as I can tell, they have
* several working designs for rocket motors,
* a paper design for a suborbital crew vehicle,
* a 1/16 scale model of that vehicle, and
* wind tunnel test data.

This is the foundation for a contract?

Papa,
They've also built and flown (dozens of times) two different rocket-powered aircraft over the past decade. They have flight hardware and have demonstrated high-tempo operations. MSS is sort of their competitor in some niches, and we take them very seriously.

~Jon

What is the "Yecheon Astro Space Center?" I googled it and there isn't much, and most of it is from the last couple of days.

Papa, here you go:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=xcor

Papa,

The Koreans sent a high level and very capable technical delegation to XCOR. They also visited XCOR's competition. Their conclusion, based on what they saw,
was that XCOR offered the best value and lowest risk.

Lee Valentine

I think it would be interesting to see how well the CFD has compared, for the Lynx, to wind tunnel test especially for transonic and supersonic speeds. From the pictures it looks like the angle of the cockpit window to the nose is high, thus a possibility of a horse shoe vortex being generated, more so at negative angles of attack. These have the possibility of being sensitive to transonic/supersonic speeds. And RANS codes sometimes have difficulty picking up on this. I gather that the earlier versions of the Ares/CLV had a ring vortex at the junction of the escape tower and capsule which created "interesting" aerodynamics at angle of attack, i.e. the CLV was an aero spike. The nose of the Lynx could also create interesting aerodynamics at transonic/supersonic speeds due to vortex shedding, especially at angles of attack past five degrees.

Do you know how well the CFD compared to XCOR's transonic/supersonic wind tunnel tests? Do you know if the wind tunnel data will be published?

Good observations, the nose is key to Lynx flight behavior.

Yes, to your first question and no to the second.
The reason is that the data are proprietary to XCOR and the Air Force.

Everyone working at XCOR will fly in the Lynx left hand seat before commercial operations begin, just as we did with the operations and propulsion prototype.

XCOR is now happy with Lynx aerodynamics.