XCOR is going to set some precedents:

"We also plan to deliver some mail to California City…deliver it, not just carry some post cards for souvenirs," Jackson added. "I don’t think that has ever been done with a piloted rocket powered vehicle. We would like to set a precedent..."

..."As far as we know, it’ll be the first intentional cross-country flight of a rocket plane…and the first roundtrip under power," Clague told SPACE.com. "It’s basically Dick’s payment," Clague continued, for flying the vehicle in its initial test program because "all we ever paid him was breakfast…and we paid for the fuel."

I'm sure they've got this worked out, but the article doesn't discuss how they handle this from a licensing standpoint. Is it an AVR flight (on an experimental aircraft certificate), or AST, with a launch license? If the latter, California City doesn't have a site license (as far as I know), so how does that work?

Rand,

The EZ-Rocket is an experimental aircraft, and therefore flies under FAA type certification, not a launch license.

- Jim

Back in 2002 when they were flying the Ez-Rocket at Oshkosh, XCOR told me that the FAA had approved them flying from any licenced airport in the USA.

This will be pretty cool. Doubly cool for me -- when I visited the US in June 2004 for the first 100 km high flight by SpaceShip One, Aleta was kind enough to lend me her car for the afternoon and I drove to California City, hired a glider, and flew it to Mojave and back. :-)

http://www.hoult.org/bruce/MojaveJune2004/

:(

search astronautix for the early german rocketeers and rocket mail.