I had lunch with Doug Jones in Mojave last week (he’s one of the “contract” employees remaining). It’s a sad end to a once-promising company.
[Thursday-morning update]
Here’s the story from Jeff Foust. I hadn’t realized that Michael Blum had moved to XCOR after Firefly went under.
[Update late afternoon]
Here’s the take from the local Midland paper.
In the bigger picture it’s not sad at all. They had some great accomplishments and people got to work on things they loved.
Most businesses fail. That’s a good thing. The people involved are better equipped for the future because of their experience.
This is one of the reasons I believed in SpaceX from 2002 forward. They didn’t try to create a new market but to get share in a proven market. XCOR went after several markets, none of them established. However, their tech may live on.
Starting new markets is difficult. We do not have a sub-orbital market, yet.
We don’t have market for rocket fuel in space. And don’t a market for rocket fuel made in space.
But Musk thinks he going to start a market for human settlement on Mars.
I think sub-orbital market is easier. And a market for rocket space in space is easier. And also I think a market for lunar water mining, is easier then a Mars settlement market.
We also don’t really have spaceport market- except one has airports which can be used for suborbital spacecraft.
But for rocket fuel market, one needs at one depot which is operational.
And for lunar mining and/or Mars settlements, one needs exploration, first. Or that would make the impossible, less impossible.
In the bigger picture it’s not sad at all.
I doubt that’s any consolation to people with families who relocated to Midland.
I’ve relocated my family a few times. Those are choices and not something to whine about. Time and unforeseen events affect everybody. They at least has an experience that will always be a part of who they are.
Whining is for lefties.
Those are choices and not something to whine about. Whining is for lefties.
Huh, well you’re kind of an ass, aren’t you? Being disappointed that you lost your job in middle-of-nowhere Texas has absolutely nothing political affiliation.
Yes, when it comes to truth I am a bit of an ass. Does this mean I don’t care? No. I have fed strangers even when it means I have had to starve for a bit. I often give to others out of my need rather than any sort of abundance because I do not put myself above others. That doesn’t even touch all that I’ve done, but those are just facts. I don’t care to brag.
I’ve been in the exact situation and worse. I don’t expect most of them will whine about it either.
You don’t abandon principles because they are circumstantially unpopular. XCOR was inspirational, but always going to fail.
has absolutely nothing political affiliation.
It absolutely does. They lost their jobs because a company went out a business. For the left this is something to fix. For adults there is nothing to fix. Adults just get on with their lives knowing they will always have setbacks to overcome.
Adult prepare for setbacks and feel shame (even when they are not at fault) when it is more than they can handle. Shame that the left never feels even though they are the most deserving of shame.
Pug, I will not assume you are a simpleton, but you are letting feelings over ride reason.
I respect and admire those XCOR employees that will go on to better things. They don’t need our pity.
Fair enough, and I believe you and I have more in common than not. Cheers and have a good day.
XCOR was inspirational, but always going to fail.
What nonsense.
>XCOR was inspirational, but always going to fail.
>>What nonsense.
They failed. You cite the difficulty of building composite supersonic wings but that is just a contributing factor.
They did a number of things besides Lynx. None of them provided them with the revenue to continue. I held my thoughts while they were a going concern but you will note I supported Greason without voicing support for XCOR. I wished them well and hoped I was wrong, but expected this day to come.
It’s not really any feather in my cap that I was right. Betting on failure is the highest probability. But I’m no naysayer. I encourage people to try even when failure is highly probable. I salute their courage.
Making predictions is a required life skill. For XCOR to not fail they needed something more which never happened. Everyone predicts the future. Few have confidence to say so.
They failed.
The fact that they failed (they haven’t, quite yet) does not imply that they were “always going to fail.” They failed for reasons of which you are probably unaware.
They failed for reasons of which you are probably unaware.
No doubt. Knowledge is always imperfect. Does that mean we never reason on the imperfect info we have?
I was always rooting for them. They developed technologies that still have value and something may still come of that.
But the company they envisioned is all but gone.
I judged it, unfairly perhaps, certainly with incomplete info, but the result fit my expectations.
How often does a person get things accidentally right before it’s no longer an accident? They met my expectations. I just stated it more forcefully than most would be comfortable with. That doesn’t make me wrong.
My judgement was also predicated on Lynx being technologically successful. It still wouldn’t have made a difference.
Just to prove my point… the smallsat market will have some minor success before going flatline. I sincerely hope a few years from now you can throw that prediction back in my face.
Just came across this. Perhaps hearing it from somebody you respect would make a difference?
I predicted it as well, but it wasn’t always doomed to fail.
it wasn’t always doomed to fail.
If you’re speaking in terms of fatalism, you are absolutely correct and we agree. However, suppose there was a point in time where you can reasonably predict their failure (as you say you did.) Could someone have reasonable predicted that eventuality before that point? Could not someone: not just your typical cowardly naysayer but a reasoning person have looked at what some engineer drew on a napkin say, “I think it’s technically possible, but after the first few customers it’s not a viable business.”
While probability may only be able to approach zero or one, practically it is reasonable to say, that will not succeed.
You can repeat your unknowledgable nonsense as much as you want, but it was not “always doomed to fail.” Its fate was sealed only in the past very few years.
Its fate was sealed only in the past very few years.
Which is no less an assertion than mine.
You seem to believe an operational Lynx would have made a difference. I don’t. If I was right about that then my assertion is also the correct one.
But I apologize for getting myself into a fruitless discussion of what if. A track record of other cases is really the only evidence that supports either assertion. By then it will all have been forgotten.
“Now that Ken’s dead I realize not everything he said was completely utter nonsense. He was almost right once… repeatedly.”
Just like Trump, Ken constantly/accidentally gets things right because there is no other possible explanation given the premise he’s just a fool. You can’t go around questioning premises, that would be chaos!
97% agree! Burn ‘im, he’s a witch.
Pug, if I had to move to Midland to work for XCOR, I would consider myself the luckiest man on Earth and blessed by God, no less. Even if it had only lasted a year.
I don’t think people working is Space realize how lucky they are.
The writing was on the wall once Jeff left the place. It isn’t the first time I’ve seen a company get killed by changing the original management from a technical oriented person to a business person who can’t feel the pulse of the business.
In restrospect the problems were there *before* Jeff left. (He wouldn’t have left if things were running well) So while the successor couldn’t feel the pulse of the business, neither could Jeff.
Was it? They certainly survived for a lot longer while he was still there. It just sounds to me like they had a business but it probably needed to run on lean margins and someone did an over-expansion.
…And didn’t that over-expansion happen on Jeff’s watch? In retrospect it was clear that Lynx was just too big of a project for XCOR to handle in one go. They did not have Scaled’s experience in building aircraft, and despite years of trying (before Jeff left), they never even assembled a complete aircraft to do taxi tests.
If I sound hard on Jeff, it is probably a reaction to people in the space community giving “saint Jeff Greason” a pass on everything. He seems like a nice guy, but no failure seems to stick to the guy. Maybe he should be a politician. 🙂
In retrospect it was clear that Lynx was just too big of a project for XCOR to handle in one go.
Yeah, it seems that way. What would have been the proper stepping stone(s) between the EZ-Rocket and Lynx MKI?
I think that Jeff would readily admit that they underestimated the difficulty of building composite supersonic wings (or at least in finding a contractor competent to do so).
“…And didn’t that over-expansion happen on Jeff’s watch? In retrospect it was clear that Lynx was just too big of a project for XCOR to handle in one go. They did not have Scaled’s experience in building aircraft, and despite years of trying (before Jeff left), they never even assembled a complete aircraft to do taxi tests.”
Well I agree with you on those assertions. In fact I said that much in this blog before in November 4, 2014:
As for the Lynx I reserve judgement until I see it but XCOR does not strike me as having enough airframe design background. Unlike you guys I do not think the airframe is the “easy” part. It might be for someone like Scaled and even they would have issues with going into high Mach flight in the atmosphere. The software tools for that suck last time I heard. Something about not having enough real world data to validate the models.
To me the airframe of a winged spacecraft has the same order of complexity as designing the engine if not more. This is one reason why I am against winged spacecraft designs to begin with. It just makes a difficult problem harder to solve for few good reasons.
XCOR is great at liquid rocket engine design. Scaled was great at airframe design but it seems they made this particular design too hard to operate safely.
Also in July 9-14, 2015 I said:
Well I’m not sure XCOR’s path is the correct one. At least SpaceX had something that had orbital launch capability to begin with.
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I think something like the X-34 actually fits better with what XCOR is trying to do.
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I think XCOR’s solution is fine for suborbital but that market is quite limited.
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You also need more structure for wings. Guess what: since the wings will experience a lot of heat on reentry (particularly for orbital vehicles) you will probably need insulation as well. Which was one of the most labor intensive parts in the maintenance of something like the Shuttle. So figure out some non-maintenance intensive wings for an orbital vehicle and then we can talk.
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But the answer to that problem would have been to downscale. I agree with you that the problems started when Jeff was the CEO but the way they went around solving the financial issues (i.e. shutting down all engine development not related to ULA) was IMHO a big mistake. I think it was fine to close down or spin out the vehicle development but depending on a single client for the engines was a recipe for trouble. They had more rocket engine clients than that and could have tried getting more. They should have focused on their area of expertise to get out of the hole.
The problem is first you build a cash flow business, then you follow your dream. Trying to make your dream into cash flow is a very risky process.
Look at Bezos for an example of low risk aerospace. He can totally fail and it wouldn’t reduce his prospects at all.
That’s kinda degrading. Bezos has done nothing like lose money. What was that joke that Musk said? If you want to make a million in space, you start with a billion?
I think we can do better than that and Musk proves it is possible. He started SpaceX with $10 million of his own cash.
I meant “Bezos has done nothing *but* lose money.”
It took SpaceX $10 million to design Falcon 1, and $100 million to design Falcon 9.
Right. So Far Musk seems to be an example of how you can actually *make* money in aerospace.
It’s a bit sad, but it’s also inspirational. Every startup is a kind of experiment; even in failure they teach a little more about what does and doesn’t work. May those involved, now older and more experienced, go on to bigger and better things.
Hear, hear. It was a very inspirational company. I hope others build on what XCOR did.
Exactly. If you want to know the country with the healthiest business environment; look at the one with the most failures in the preceding two years.
A company that fails after 10 years is almost guaranteed to have had new management.
Realism trumps sentiment. Soft heads are what make Marxist politicians and their ‘screw up the economy actions’ possible.
From the Parabolic Arc story: “XCOR management will retain critical employees on a contract basis to maintain the company’s intellectual property and is actively seeking other options that would allow it to resume full employment and activity.”
It’s not good. But nor apparently is it a dissolution and sale of assets “end”.
It’s starting to look like the launch market is going to turn into SpaceX and whoever can pull in billions in subsidies to try to catch up with them: CNSA (China), ISRO (India), Blue Origin (Bezos)… I honestly don’t know about Roscosmos (Russia), ULA or Arianespace.
Roscosmos and Arianespace are funded by nation states. They are considered a strategic investment so they will continue for the next couple of decades regardless of how few flight they need to launch.
As for Bezos if he continues spending like this without making any money, even he will eventually run out of cash.
He is spending at a fixed rate, and it’s a rate less than his income.
Is he? Amazon was famous for being the company that’s never had a profit since like for ever.
The market is convinced that at some point Amazon will flip the switch from expansion to profit just as Apple did, and become the greatest cash-generating machine in human history.
IIRC he owns about 20% of Amazon, which makes him the second richest man in the world at $80B (about midway between Bill Gates and Warren Buffet).
A correction, Rand. I have not been offered any contract with XCOR and I am in the process of moving on to new opportunities.
OK, thanks for the update. But if you’re not part of their intellectual property, who is?
Godspeed, Mr. Jones. You build bad-ass hardware and your work at XCOR has been an inspiration to me.