Abstract
In 1999, XCOR comprised four employees who had just been laid off from Rotary Rocket. With no money, no investors, and little in the way of a business plan, they decided to strike out on their own and founded XCOR (www.xcor.com). Fifteen years and US$45 million (mostly raised from venture funds) later, XCOR is on the threshold of commercial suborbital passenger operations – all for US$150,000 a ticket.
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Notes
- 1.
Rutan’s test flight of the EZ-Rocket marked the first time since the final flight of the X-1 program that a rocket plane had landed after taking off from the ground under its own power.
- 2.
Jeff Greason’s testimony is included in Appendix I.
- 3.
The CSLA is a federal law enacted on 30 October 1984. Its purpose was to facilitate commercial spaceflight activities. It is also referred to as the Expendable Launch Vehicle Commercialization Act.
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Seedhouse, E. (2016). XCOR: A Brief History. In: XCOR, Developing the Next Generation Spaceplane. Springer Praxis Books(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26112-6_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26112-6_1
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