I didn’t live tweet it, but here are some tweets from Jeff Foust on Gibson’s #ISPCS comments yesterday:
Jay Gibson, XCOR: we don’t have the benefit of a wealthy backer; that makes us very feisty and innovative. #ispcs
— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) October 7, 2015
Gibson: we’re building a platform that is frequent, affordable and capable; we’ll let the free market determine how to use it. #ispcs
— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) October 7, 2015
Gibson: our focus right now is getting ready to fly, “and we will soon.” #ispcs
— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) October 7, 2015
Jay Gibson, XCOR: we don’t have the benefit of a wealthy backer; that makes us very feisty and innovative.
Perhaps XCOR should forego money entirely to become really, really feisty and innovative.
Trying to make a virtue of a necessity is one of those rhetorical techniques that should be used sparingly.
Trying to make a virtue of a necessity is one of those rhetorical techniques that should be used sparingly.
I agree, but it comes up in every XCOR presentation.
I agree, but it comes up in every XCOR presentation.
As someone who tells the XCOR story occasionally, I have to sympathize with Jay. Maybe folks inside the industry have tired of hearing it, but there are new people joining or investing in the industry all the time. And I always have to go through the litany: No, we’re not the same company as SpaceX. (We had the “X” first.) No, we’re not Richard Branson’s project. No, Paul Allen isn’t backing us. No, we’re not building a replacement for the Space Shuttle. No, no, no.
Only once we get past all the honest misconceptions can we get on with selling the awesome potential of XCOR and its team.
So, naive theory would say – if their potential and team is so awesome, someone with deep pockets would have backed them already and they would need no introduction.
This is off-topic, but Rand, I think you would enjoy watching Ben Carson’s opponents criticize Carson’s question about where gravity comes from.
For example: http://americablog.com/2015/10/ben-carson-gravity-boy-i-dunno.html
A number of liberal bloggers are saying this: ” As it turns out, we know where gravity comes from.” and then they cite this link: http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_gp_gr.html#gravcause
But that’s an answer that NASA should be ashamed of.
So: Hooray for Ben Carson’s ability to admit his ignorance and shame on leftwingers and NASA for not being able to do the same.
Oh, nuts, that was supposed to go in the nutritional science posting, so that it wasn’t completely off-topic. I apologize.
Holy wow, Bob, was that ever a crap answer. They could have at least made an attempt to invoke the Higgs boson, even though that too is a crap answer (particles are given mass because the Higgs gloms on to them, and the Higgs has mass. So Higgs are glomming onto Higgs, or something).
via Instapundit, XCOR is hiring:
http://www.xcor.com/about-us/vacancies/
I infer from that that they’ve decided to manufacture the wings in house. That doesn’t seem good. And by “they” I mean the new management.
What about those vacancies leads you to believe that, Rand? And when you say wings, do you mean the wings for Mk I that were supposed to be delivered sometime in the fall? I think Jeff Greason said sometime in the fall at Space Access this year.
I keep a pretty close eye on XCOR job openings and these all look pretty familiar.
Just the fact that the wings have been an ongoing issue, and are probably the tall pole in the tent to flight.
Snort. “New management” hails from the Pentagon, where no one was ever fired for slamming the door on innovation and no one ever had a problem that couldn’t be solved by troweling on a layer or two or ten of bureaucracy.
Paper-pushing bean-counter Gibson knows next to nothing about aerospace, exactly nothing about engineering, and less than nothing about bootstrapping a new industry. He needs to take his sleeve-garters and his green eyeshade back to a cubicle in the accounting department of a paper-bag plant in Otter Haunch, Wisconsin.