Inc. 500 Company Will Help Take Teachers to Space
XCOR Aerospace, one of the companies signed up to help take teachers to space, has just made Inc. magazine’s Inc. 500 list of fast-growing private companies. The magazine says:
Why it’s growing: Speed to market. The company strives to design, build, and test rockets on a much shorter schedule than the rest of the industry, where the norm is to conduct only a few rocket tests a year and then analyze the results at length. Among its process innovations, XCOR uses a mobile test launch pad and eschews toxic propellants, which require delicate handling.
An XCOR press release says:
XCOR’s journey from a start-up in 1999 to the Inc. 500 was not easy. Aerospace veterans Jeff Greason, Dan DeLong, Aleta Jackson, and Doug Jones formed XCOR, where they built and tested their first rocket engines on a tiny budget. The breakthrough came when the team decided to modify a pusher-propeller-powered Long EZ airplane and replace its conventional piston engine with XCOR-designed and built rocket engines. This demonstrated XCOR’s re-usable and re-startable rocket motors on actual flying hardware. The rocket plane not only proved the reliability of XCOR’s technology, it generated publicity and helped raise the firm’s profile in the aerospace industry. This attracted serious investors, including Esther Dyson and the investment group Boston Harbor Angels.
The higher profile and proven technology helped XCOR compete for and win a series of contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense. These contracts include building and testing a methane engine for NASA, and designing a suborbital space plane for the Air Force….
XCOR is currently working on a craft designed to carry people and payloads into suborbital space, but its longer term goal is to build a craft that can place them into orbit.
For the complete press release, look here.
