Chief Engineer Dan DeLong of XCOR emails:

Patricia Grace Smith, FAA Associate Administrator, has made a public statement that there are three organizations with RLV launch licenses in process at AST. They are: Armadillo Aerospace, Scaled Composites, and XCOR Aerospace. Furthermore, she said that XCOR’s license application has been deemed “sufficiently complete”. This means the FAA now has a maximum of 180 days to either issue a license or report to Congress why they did not.

Notice the change in terminology from “substantially complete” to “sufficiently complete”. Also, I do not yet have an on-line reference for her statement. It came to me from Jeff Greason; he and Randall Clague are currently in Washington DC, and were surprised at the speediness of the announcement.

This is good news, and will establish the precedent–another first for XCOR. I assume that means the Mojave Airport has passed the environmental review, but I’m sure that someone will correct me if that’s a false inference.

I also assume that the license will be issued in less than the 180 days–I can’t see why they would delay it much at this point.