Ten other space companies to watch this year.
I’m pretty sure that XCOR’s hangar isn’t over ten thousand feet long. I also think he overstates the difficulties with getting a payload on the ISS. Nanoracks has made that pretty painless. I wonder why he didn’t mention VG, which is rolling out the new SS2 next month?
Dear Geektime:
Quit listening to your marketers and build a readable website. Don’t jam your social media links, your pop-ups and your bottom margin advertising over the text. Learn how margins can affect different browsers, such as Opera so the reader doesn’t have to side scroll.
(Sorry for the off-topic rant, but I couldn’t read the article until I switched browsers, and even then I had to side scroll.)
“They haven’t gotten a test flight off the ground yet, but with their own 10,735-foot-long XCOR Aerospace Hangar 61 in the Mojave desert, they want to fly in the next two years.”
They want to fly in the next two years? Does that mean fly the Mk II to space? Or just get daylight under the wheels of Mk I?
A hanger that big, they might just want to fly from one side to the other.
It’s a huge tract of land.
Surprising that they describe Rocket Labs Rutherford engine as “turbo pumped” when the most revolutionary (ha) thing about it is that it’s electric pumped.
Blame Rocketlab.
http://www.rocketlabusa.com/about-us/propulsion/rutherford/
Many of us have been wondering what the heck that means for a while now.
I’m struggling to even imagine what the reporter misheard. 10,735 ft is a little shorter than the long runway at Mojave, but twice the length of anything at Midland.
Maybe it’s the monthly rent.
10 thousand square feet, maybe.
The author is stated to be “new to tech” or something like that. It’s quite apparent that he’s parachuting in to both tech in general and space projects in particular.
It’s equally apparent, from the complete lack of competent copy editing on offer, that no one else on the Geektime staff knows anything about tech or space either. The entire site seems to be an exercise in running something – anything – up the flagpole and hoping that enough people salute to cover the hosting bill.
Oh, probably yes, 10000 sq ft would be about right. 100 ft or 30 m square. I’m so used to metric units that I didn’t think about square feet.
I guess maybe the XCOR person just said “we have 10735 feet here” eliding the “square” as real estate people do, and the reporter took it upon themselves to add the “-long”.