Lynx

The Lynx was XCOR Aerospace’s ambitious venture into reusable sub‑orbital spaceflight. Developed from the company’s earlier Eureka demonstrator, the Lynx project began in 2007 and aimed to produce a horizontally‑taking‑off, jet‑powered vehicle capable of carrying a pilot and a small payload to altitudes above 100 km. Powered by a pair of liquid‑hydrogen‑fed, throttleable rocket engines, the Lynx could accelerate from a runway to Mach 2 in under a minute, then coast on a ballistic trajectory before a controlled re‑entry and runway landing. Its lightweight composite airframe, movable canard foreplane, and heat‑shielded nose‑cone were engineered for rapid turnaround, targeting a flight cadence of up to ten missions per day. Although a full flight test program never materialized—XCOR filed for bankruptcy in 2017—the Lynx remains a notable milestone in the evolution of private space access. It demonstrated that a small, reusable rocket could be integrated with conventional aviation infrastructure, influencing later concepts such as Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and Reaction Engines’ SABRE. The Lynx’s design philosophy continues to inspire efforts to lower the cost and increase the frequency of sub‑orbital research and tourism flights.