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.

I can't see why they would delay it much at this point.

Umm, because they can? Although we would hope not.

Kudos to XCOR! (Fingers crossed!)

So are they building something other than the Xerus? What are they planning?

My understanding is that they are building Xerus, but that this license is for an intermediate test vehicle that will prove out many of the technologies necessary to build it.

Mojave Airport's spaceport application is still in work, and you are correct about the license application being for an intermediate vehicle.

The appropriate quote, to the great surprise of absolutely no one, comes from Winston Churchill: "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

-R