A nice round up of what’s happening from Sarah Cruddas. I hadn’t realized that Space Angels had a branch in Europe.
Meanwhile, XCOR has moved half its staff to Midland, and one of their engineers now estimates 6-9 months to first flight. They must still be having wing-delivery issues.
I was just out at XCOR two weeks ago and the wings for Lynx were nowhere to be seen. They had some parts for them but that was it. Still, they have made a lot of progress and I can’t wait to see them get the bird in the air.
Jeff has been strong on sub-contracting between New Space companies being a big part of building thriving New Space industry networks. Since Joe saw nothing looking like wings, I would assume that these are sub-contracted out.
I very much hope this is not biting XCOR schedules with more sub-contractor delays. That would mean that the SpaceX tendency to bring production in-house is more resilient, for keeping to schedule. That strategy holds a capital problem for companies without the deep pockets of SpaceX, and still guarantees nothing except lower delivery risks, in the longer term.
Yes, the wings, and structure in general, is contracted out.