Suborbital vehicle development updates

In yesterday’s sessions at the Next-Generation Suborbital Researchers Conference in Boulder, Colorado, four major developers of suborbital vehicles presented updates on their efforts. Here’s a summary of what they revealed:

Virgin Galactic: Stephen Attenborough provided considerable details about their plans to flight test SpaceShipTwo (SS2). Ground testing will continue until the end of this [...]

Aviation Week honors the “Space Entrepreneur”

The efforts of the emerging NewSpace field to reshape the space industry have attracted the attention of a leading trade publication, Aviation Week & Space Technology, which named “The Space Entrepreneur” as its 2009 PErson of the Year in this week’s issue. “Collectively, they are in the vanguard of a new industry, poised to [...]

XCOR wins a major customer

XCOR Aerospace announced this afternoon a major business development for the suborbital vehicle developer: a contract to provide suborbital space launch services for a South Korean organization. XOCR will provide and operate a Lynx Mark 2 vehicle to the Yecheon Astro Space Center under a “wet lease” model, pending export control approvals. The center [...]

XCOR and other Space Access highlights

The high point, arguably, Friday at Space Access ’09 was a presentation by Jeff Greason, president of XCOR Aerospace. There were no major announcements in his talk (a contrast to last year, when XCOR spoke at Space Access immediately after announcing their Lynx suborbital vehicle) but there were some items of note:

Their engine [...]

Video: Whitehorn assesses the competition

Below is a brief snippet of Will Whitehorn’s speech at the FAA Commercial Space Transportation Conference on Friday. In this segment Whitehorn examines some of the other ventures developing suborbital vehicles, including Rocketplane, EADS Astrium, Blue Origin, XCOR, Armadillo Aerospace, and Copenhagen Suborbitals, a little-known Danish firm developing a very minimalist suborbital system. Whitehorn’s [...]

XCOR press conference highlights

The XCOR press conference Tuesday largely confirmed the details that had previously leaked out in the days leading up to the announcement (the XCOR press release includes links to the full press conference video as well as the promotional video shown during the press conference), but there were a few interesting details to come [...]

Coverage of XCOR press conference

I’ll be posting updates from the XCOR press conference today here: Click Here

Previewing the XCOR announcement

As announced last week, XCOR will unveil some new details about their business plans for Lynx at a press conference today, including their first customer and their sales partner. Much of that news, though, has already leaked out.

Yesterday The Daily Mail reported that London investment banker Per Wimmer will be XCOR’s first customer. [...]

XCOR customer announcement next week

I heard about this last week during a brief visit to Mojave, but it’s now official: XCOR Aerospace will announce plans next week for Lynx ticket sales. The December 2 press conference in Beverly Hills will include the announcement of its “General Sales Agent”, a “well-known and established travel entrepreneur” who will be handling [...]

Whitehorn on XCOR

During the Q&A session of his ISDC speech Thursday, Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn was asked about thoughts about XCOR Aerospace, who announced plans for its own suborbital vehicle, Lynx, in March:

XCOR is a company I respect, but with respect to them, they’re not building a spaceship. They’re building basically a high-altitude [...]