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XCOR Aerospace's Experimental Motorcycle For A Road Trip Test Run!
The propulsion parts of the XCOR Aerospace's Lynx Suborbital Vehicle shall now be tested on a street bike driven on Route 66. The TRIUMPH motorcycle has been modified a bit, so that all the wear testing on the rocket fuel pump bearing system could be analyzed cheaply.
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Cheaply, because had the same parts been tested on a pump test stand, it would have cost them somewhere around $500 per minute to run. Luckily for them, the Triumph Street Triple boasted of an identical cylinder arrangement and approximately same horsepower as the rocket fuel pumps in the Lynx, and owing to this, the team was able to gather twenty hours of necessary data on the rocket pump bearings - same as 400 Lynx flights- simply by driving from Roswell to Mojave. The motorcycle was customized as per the XCOR rocket piston pump technology and then dispatched to Motion Performance in Roswell. It was here where the XCOR engineers modified and tested the bike for the trip.
Cheaply, because had the same parts been tested on a pump test stand, it would have cost them somewhere around $500 per minute to run. Luckily for them, the Triumph Street Triple boasted of an identical cylinder arrangement and approximately same horsepower as the rocket fuel pumps in the Lynx, and owing to this, the team was able to gather twenty hours of necessary data on the rocket pump bearings - same as 400 Lynx flights- simply by driving from Roswell to Mojave. The motorcycle was customized as per the XCOR rocket piston pump technology and then dispatched to Motion Performance in Roswell. It was here where the XCOR engineers modified and tested the bike for the trip.
The data collected during the drive pointed to no such difference in the bearing conditions before and after the ride, examining which, the test results was termed successful by Dan DeLong, XCOR Chief Engineer. Check out this video: