XCOR Lays off Remaining Employees
Lynx engine hot fire. (Credit: XCOR)
Struggling XCOR Aerospace has laid off its remaining employees in Mojave, Calif. and Midland, Texas.
“Due to adverse financial conditions XCOR had to terminate all employees as of 30 June 2017,” the company said in a statement. “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.”
The move follows the news last month that CEO Jay Gibson was leaving the company after President Donald Trump nominated him for a high-level position at the Department of Defense. Gibson left the company at the end of June.
XCOR hired Gibson in March 2015 to replace founder Jeff Greason. The objective was for Gibson to focus on the business side while Greason focused on completing construction on the two-seat Lynx suborbital space plane.
That arrangement did not work out. By November, Greason and two other founders, Dan DeLong and Aleta Jackson, had left the company to found Agile Aerospace.
Greason, DeLong, Jackson and Doug Jones founded the company in 1999 after being laid off from Rotary Rocket.
In May 2016, XCOR laid off about 25 employees — roughly half of its workforce — and suspended work on the Lynx. The company has since refocused its energies on its rocket engine work.
XCOR had been working on an upper stage for United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan launch vehicle.
116 responses to “XCOR Lays off Remaining Employees”
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So, what engine is going to be used on Vulcan? RL-10 again?
I assume you are talking about ACES engine options? Blue Origin’s BE-3 is still in the running.
Aerojet Rocketdyne is the other competitor for the upper stage.
…hence the mention of RL-10 in Pete’s post.
Buy XCOR and make the engine themselves?
There will be no Vulcan….soon….my guess.
XCOR was, and is, not on Vulcan’s critical path.
I agree, just think that Vulcan will soon hit a dead end too, when the sat biz slow down some.
I would be skeptical of anyone who ever thought Rotary Rocket was a good idea. Space planes have not been kind to the business world. Depending how BE-4 goes may very well tell us about BE-3U.
Be skeptical of me then, because under certain conditions the RR makes sense. And XCOR had vision and integrity when I associated with them
ok
I was on a phone earlier and had to keep it short.
The concept of the tiprocket helicopter for a first stage in some size ranges makes theoretical sense. Theoretical as in using it in the same manner as the Falcon is being reused with (again theoretically) less refurb and turnaround time. Less pad maintenance as well. The size range would be much smaller as well. Gas-n-go from any flat surface is quite attractive.
Rotary Rocket tried to go SSTO right out of the box. That was a bad idea. Though it may not have been obvious until the initial work was done.
“Rotary Rocket tried to go SSTO right out of the box. That was a bad idea.”
Yea, bad idea even not right out of the box given current and certainly 1990s technology.
Large rocket driven rotating structures sounds like something someone would say “makes theoretical sense”.
Looks like F9 Block V is targeting 24 hour turn with zero maintenance and just inspection…what more could RR offer than that? And why would you need it?
The information available in the 90s made the RR system seem more feasible to some. And Falcon9 (10 for 10 lets see it again) hasn’t demonstrated that yet, though they are far more likely than any would have believed a very few years ago.
Some engineers dream too big, not realizing that economics and small budgets are not the only things that can kill a space project; physics, material science and chemistry can wreck havoc with big space dreams too.
I think XCOR covered all that other stuff pretty well. Their problem was always money.
XCor, yes (you are correct), but the planned SSTO Roton, no! …Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn’t the Atlas C/D as close to a SSTO orbital system as engineers have ever achieved?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
“Large rocket driven rotating structures sounds like something someone would say “makes theoretical sense”.”
Well, it DID make theoretical sense. Still does. They did the engineering work.
Helicopters with rocket-propelled blades have flown before.
The idea is to use the rotating blades to pump the propellant to the combustion chamber. It’s like getting free thrust from your fuel pump.
The rotating speeds were quite modest, well within the limits of commercially-available sliding seals.
What do you think makes it a bad idea?
Because rockets go to space, there is not atmosphere in space. Designing your rocket around the environment it doesn’t (shouldn’t) spend a lot of time is dumb. This applies to spaceplanes too although smaller lifting bodies probably straddle that line. In the case of a rocket standing on its tail, no reason on Earth it should have giant aero surface on it just to get to a fraction of a percent down range. Engine are in the back turbo-pump in the front? Please give me a break.
Sounds like you don’t understand the concept, or the design, or the engineering. You’re good at the snarky answers, though.
Well the results speak for themselves.
And now we must add “logic” to the list of things you don’t understand.
Look, I’m usually not this savage. I apologize. The news about XCOR hit me hard – I worked there for over four years. I didn’t take your snarky answers well this evening.
Here’s where your logic breaks down. You appear to be saying that “If a company’s technology doesn’t work, it will go out of business. Rotary Rocket failed, so their technology must not have worked.”
In other words, you argued thusly: “if A, then B. I observe that B is true, therefore so is A.”
Not necessarily. Businesses can fail for all kinds of reasons. The results (Rotary Rocket failed) do not necessarily speak to the feasibility of the Roton concept.
The Wikipedia article on Rotary Rocket is surprisingly detailed, and the technology descripton is pretty good. Have a look at it to get an idea of the wins of the Roton concept. One is mentioned by redneck, above. Another is reentry – the blades act as your parachute, too.
After you’ve done that, feel free to come back and ask more questions. If you are less snarky, I will try to answer them.
Given enough time it means exactly that. Lots of people looking at space transport and reusability now. SpaceX and Blue building on McD Douglas DCX and Masten. Just because DCX ended in flames doesn’t make it bad (because people saw the value and moved on). If no one picks it up, or at least releases a design reference based on it, that usually means it is a non-starter. Here is the first problem, often repeated here by others, you start with an engine then build a rocket. If you are changing engines in the middle you are doing it wrong.
Go read the Wikipedia article. Here’s the link for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
If you want to talk smack about the technology, have the class to read up on it first.
With this post, Snarky’s credibility is now ≤0
Wholly smokes, I had creditability before that? Thanks for lifting my day!
“Well, it DID make theoretical sense. Still does. They did the engineering work.”
Indeed, they were about to proceed with the first full scale engine tests of the rotary motor when the money ran out.
There is a difference between Tinkering and Analytical engineering.
Yep. And both approaches have chalked up both significant successes and abject failures. The optimum is somewhere on the continuum between these poles. Finding where that optimum is separates the greats from everyone else.
Bad hub to tip ratio, poor solidity factors,
Impossible scaling.
Solidity factor is important for axial impellers, yes? The Roton rotor is axial w/r/t air but not to the propellant, which flows at right angles to the rotation axis.
It can’t be THAT bad, since Roton blades are like those on all flying rotorcraft. If solidity factor mattered to helicopters, wouldn’t they look different than they do?
I don’t follow about the hub to tip ratio. For non-axial impellers, what does hub to tip ratio tell you?
Scaling was apparently a problem, according to the Wikipedia article. When RR had to scale up the size of their vehicle after the small comsat market collapsed, they gave up on the rotor blades.
Are you Pat Bahn?
1) Do segregate the difference between the Air blades that they were using for landing and the spinning “Rotary Disk Engine” that they were using for launch.
in the RDE, the solidity factor mattered a lot because it constrained how much you could push through the hub to the tip … It matters a lot for scaling… in an conventional axial flow turbine you can scale up by making the engine wider or longer. In a radial flow turbine, you can’t. Scaling for pressure hurts volumetric flow. it’s why jet engines opted for axial flow.
you can do radial flow but it’s a kind of limited sweet spot.
some car turbo boosters and some water pumps do that but
it’s hard to scale those.
The problem the RDE had was you want to flow a lot of mass out the tips,
and at pretty high pressure.That meant you needed either short hub-tip ratio for mass flow or you want long hub-tip for high pressure but you can’t both.
There were reasons why when external investors came in, they pushed to use a conventional rocket engine for the base propulsion.
The same problem occurred when they were trying to use little tip rockets on helicopter blades.
“Looks like F9 Block V is targeting 24 hour turn with zero maintenance
and just inspection…what more could RR offer than that? And why would
you need it?”
Bill Gates, 1984, …”Why would anyone want more than 128K RAM?”
Yes, and if using more memory were gated by airspace closure and pad securing you would have a point. I don’t doubt in the long run (hell SpaceX already states the goal) to turn around boosters faster but that is optimization of an established process (probably Methane booster with simplified systems…) along with a lot of change in public policy to allow for very high launch rate.
RR didn’t get to 100 feet and 100 mph so the merits of a sub-orbital or orbital turn around capability is a little nutty.
The question being raised is of Relative Value and market demand.
Someday we will have the hourly flight to orbital space stations, but
right now we have a market with monthly flights. Being able to jump up to Weekly flights would be a huge deal.
We will know what looks more reasonable once the weekly flights turn into reality and we have new customers banging away for daily flights and people sketching up missions that need hourly flights.
It will happen but, how we get there is challenging and it will never be something like the Roton.
While the comparison might be valid, it is an urban legend that Bill Gates ever said this.
(I would paste a url of a 2008 computerworld article if my frakin phone would let me…)
“24 hour turn” only works if can build a satellite every 24 hrs, not every 24 months.
There are something like 20,000 commo and other smallsats planned for launch over the next five years. Half of them are going to be SpaceX’s own birds launched on their own rockets. SpaceX will likely launch a good chunk of the half that aren’t its own too. Do the math, Dude.
I actually got a few in my garage too…
Just think of Rotary Rocket as having come late to the party of using captured German aerospace technology. The Germans had a design, late in the war, for a VTVL fighter that used a three-bladed tip-rocket rotor.
not every german idea was good. Wether it was invading Russia,
Killing jews and chasing jewish scientists out of Germany,
or that FW Rocket rotary wing aircraft with tip rockets,
The French made good use of it to build the Sud-Ouest Djinn.
All those ideas were bad, but they were also all Hitler’s ideas. I’m pretty sure Der Fuhrer didn’t come up with the idea of tip-rocket rotorcraft.
The German Industry had all sorts of bad ideas.
HE-177 and Panzer VIII come to mind…
The ME 163 was a pretty bad idea.
HE-177 was the Nazi B-29, but less successful. Both development programs were plagued by engine problems. Not sure it’s entirely fair to call it a bad idea.
The Panzer VIII Maus was a bad idea. A very bad idea.
The ME-163 was a Hail Mary pass that didn’t pay off. With more time for design refinement and more resources to build it, it might have been formidable. Fortunately for us, the Germans had neither.
HE-177 was sized to do dive bombing, not high altitude bombing..
Doctrine was driving a bad idea.
The ME-163 was silly. Sure, rocket powered to shoot up to Altitude but it was gliding back. Escort fighters would chase it as soon as it ran out of gas and poke just one or two holes in it. Just enough to barbecue the pilots.
Jeff Greason and I had very differennt views on things. But XCOR deserved better. I wish I had Bill Gates money–I’d give to XCOR, MASTEN–anyone trying different things.
Earth is not a planet that allows a metal using species to get real payloads to orbit with petro-chemical based propellants. Let alone come back and do it again. On Earth any SSTO system is made better in probably every metric by going to two stages.
Give it 40 years after we’ve perfected forms of carbon that outperform all our metals, and again use those novel carbon forms to make dense, super-fuels with Isp’s over 400 sec, or use external power sources like a laser launch system, and SSTO starts to make some sense. But it’s still science-fiction to combine SSTO and economical, even SSTO (with appreciable payload) and possible. Without running the numbers the best real world SSTO out there is probably a Falcon 9 first stage. I’ll bet the payload minus itself is pretty close to not much.
Edit: Shrink Earth down to 5600 km in radius down from 6370 km and the mass goes from 5.97 E24 kg to 3.9 E24 kg and orbital velocity goes down from 7.8 km/sec to 6.8 km/sec. That would help a lot.
Gotta get Mother Earth on the Atkins Diet right away.
“The concept of the tiprocket helicopter for a first stage in some size ranges makes theoretical sense.”
Only if you are unfamiliar with pump theory.
You and I were arguing the point in LA 15 years ago and usenet before that. Nothing’s changed on your side at least.
Nothing has changed in Pump Physics.
There are reasons small aircraft still use reciprocating engines and propellers and there are reasons big birds use TurboFans.
Cruise missiles are smaller than most small aircraft and they don’t use reciprocating engines, they use turbofans – little ones. The reason most small planes use reciprocating engines is the same reason they also use magneto ignition and carburetor induction – the FAA certification process for small General Aviation craft has been stuck in the 40’s since the 40’s.
My late father was in charge of medium bomber maintenance at several air bases in North Africa, Sicily and Italy during WW2. I suspect the men he commanded, if they could be moved 75 years forward in history, would find current small General Aviation aircraft right in their wheelhouse.
The Tomahawk cruises at 550 MPH. That makes it like a very small Lear Jet, without landing gear then a cessna.
A Cessna 172 is about 2,500 pounds with a full fuel load and is 27 feet long. A Tomahawk weighs about 1,000 pounds more and is 20 feet long. The first ever LearJet, the model 23, had a max gross takeoff weight upwards of six tons and was 43 feet long.
One of these things is not like the others.
A LearJet Model 31 cruises at 515 MPH.
A Tomahawk Cruises at 550 MPH
A Cessna 172 cruises at 115 Kts.
One of these things is not like the other..
Damn.
Obviously the company has been in trouble for some time, but I’d really hoped they would be one of tbe few to “make it”. Unlike so many others, they made it past the “paper rocket” stage of development and were actually cutting metal. The Lynx had such potential. Not only for space tourism, but for suborbital science too.
I was concerned when they went from their rocket powered Long-EZ to a new airframe and engine. For the group that wants to call itself Agile Aerospace now, that’s not a very “agile” (scrum-like) strategy.
In retrospect I think it will be clear that Lynx didn’t have potential, it was a symptom of the problem. With Lynx they just bit off far more than they could chew. They did not have the experimental aircraft builder capability nor mindset. IMO.
It’s good to cut metal but it’s important to do the engineering first.
There’s too much in XCOR for someone not to buy it up. Question is, who will?
What do you do with it once you have it? Even if Greason buys it up for pennies, what’s next?
If I had the investment money, I’d be on the phone to Jeff an hour ago. If Lynx could be nailed in a reasonable time frame, the secon call would be to XCOR.
An auctioneer is being prepared.
And you would probably just sink a whole lot of investment money into it for no return.
I was disappointed to see on their last big web site overhaul that several components such as the piston pump were no longer being offered. Xcor has a number of technologies that they have developed over the years just sitting on a shelf. Lynx is a very ambitious project that will take some resources to complete, but a buyer could leverage many other finished (or nearly finished) products. The products are not like selling snack food and it will take a management team biased towards the technical rather than a herd of MBA’s that think there is no difference in selling aerospace over consumer goods. When I’ve talked with companies about buying technical products and find my contact to not know anything about engineering, I find another supplier.
Very fair question. I await developments.
Let’s not forget the energy they injected into the new American aerospace scene. It’s also very humbling to note that on the propulsion and tank side of things, only Space X had fully succeeded and Blue seems credible as does RocketLab. Space X alone is an amazing payoff for the alt-space movement. The rest of the success seems to have come from the small sat community. I think the lesson learned from the rest of the very natural failures of ‘alt-space’ is just how hard this is. There were a lot of good people at XCor, their failure would have been easier to account for if they had failed earlier. Think of what they made it through, the dot-com bust of 1999, the collapse of 2008, and still went a long way to passing legislation favorable to the development of small aerospace. They did a lot. What I find so interesting is how XCor and Virgin have persisted so long, and still failed. On a first order I just consider it a natural outcome of a ‘buckshot’ approach to trying to open a new frontier. My lesson taken has been to have something to sell early to keep the lights on.
Alt-space? Please don’t make that a word vonbraun and v2 already gets space uncomfortably associated with nazi’s as it is…
Sorry, but alt-space goes way back to the 90’s to the alt series of newsgroups. I imagine the alt-right got it’s moniker there too. You probably have a point, but I’m not one to change the vocabulary to fit somebody’s political leanings. I’ve read my “Emmanuel Goldstein”, and grew up watching the Communist Bloc doing that for the first 3rd of my life. So please take no offense when I see your point on this, but will not go along.
If you are right then the term alt-space must have died with the 90’s launch providers that tried to kick off a LEO constellation bubble, because this is literally the first I’ve ever heard this. You’re probably thinking of “new space” which is the term used these days of recent and innovative space companies.
I seem to remember hearing alt-space and new-space overlapping when Space X started to launch real hardware. There may have been a conscious effort to stop using alt-space, but as usual, I don’t read the memo. Alt-space would have been used more often in the 90’s when usenet was proportionally larger than it is today compared to total web traffic. So I think you’re on to something about planting it firmly in that era.
I would say the change from “Alt Space” to “New Space” occurred in the late 2000s. When I graduated in ’06 it was the dominate term for SpaceX, Scaled, Armadillo and all the other groups (many of which obviously don’t exist now).
“Alt-space” is a reference to the old newsgroups catagorization. But today it belongs to the ufo conspiracy, anti-gravity, perpetual motion scene.
No, it faded out when many of the Alt-Space firms started being assimilated as New Space Contractors for NASA.
The term Alt-Space predates Alt-Right by nearly two decades. It was a term used to refer to firms that were not looking to NASA funding or support to reach space. Instead they were seeking an alternative to NASA to move forward in space. In the early 2000’s Rick Tumlinson invented the term “New Space” to rebrand the lagging Space Frontier Foundation Conferences. Since many of the Alt-Space firms had started taking NASA money then and had started the process of being assimilated as new NASA Contractors the term New Space started to replace the term Alt-Space as a new way of doing business with NASA.
But actually, for a firm like XCOR that has mostly steered clear of NASA funding, the term Alt-Space is accurate, proper, and not “evil”.
The term Alt-Right was only invented during the 2008 Presidential Campaign as part of the identity politics strategy used. It has since achieved its current status which I think you are referring to. However there is also the term Alt-Left that refers to those who are extreme liberals. But its unlikely in the current media bubbles that folks live in for those using the term Alt-Right to see it. But if you google Alt-Left you will find it.
Billionaires can afford to fail once or twice, trying new things, and lose millions doing it. But small-time companies or dreamers, be they frauds like ARCA, ignorant asses like the fellow who bought a Soviet space station and had it shipped to the Island of Man where it would never leave the ground, incompetents like XCor, or well-intentioned but naive businesses like that Swiss spaceplane company that went bankrupt….well…you get the story.
What’s wrong with using straight up-and-down bi-propellant rockets without wings? What’s wrong with using parachutes on capsules?
Up and down straight rockets have failed many times too. Firefly, Armadillo, Beal are all different folded groups/teams for all different reasons. Some of them can blame not having enough money which is the default go to for all the new space apologists .. but clearly not all.
EDIT: i see a pattern though. I wouldn’t put a lot of credence into any of the groups or companies that used to regularly show up at Space Access Society conferences. Whereas there are plenty of other emerging new space businesses, not one of the SAS crowd seems to make it
So you are saying, winged spacecraft are SAFER????…If I were a space-tourist, I would prefer a hard landing on terra firma by parachute while I was inside a capsule. I only know of one lethal parachute-capsule failure in 56 years: Soyuz 1.
At least a capsule can have escape solids attached either to the sides of the capsule, on top, or beneath if you have to get away from a failing booster.
chutes are nice, but operationally expensive. When it’s just a person and you can carry the chute off and one person can repack it, it’s not so bad.
on a human carrying capsule, the chutes get big. you want 3 for redundancy, and those are getting dragged across the desert.
That’s lots of inspection, collection, repacking…
That also means you want to have off road recovery of the capsule. Big trucks with big off road gear. That also gets pricey…
There are reasons aircraft like to land at airfields…
No, what I’m saying is even a sane/simple technical approach does not take you to space. As with everything else, right combination of investment, talent, team, market opportunity are all important.
I think what has been thoroughly demonstrated here is that the idea of small teams on shoestring budgets bootstrapping their way to space through perseverance, ingenuity and hard work is somewhat delusional
Last sentence says it all. U have to have a constant stream of money to make these work. Sadly, it is a lesson that politicians and MBAs never really think about. A politician is generally about simply bringing home the bacon, OR making a big thing happen.
For us to go to Mars, we NEED to get a small lunar base going and then have it funded by multiple nations using the service. Putting a base on the moon will not get us to Mars, but building the launch infrastructure for the lunar base WILL make it possible.
Congress needs to focus on adding 2 habitats to the ISS and NASA-vetting them. From there, if NASA /Congress says we are going to put a base on.the moon, then multiple nations will use private launch/habitat service to get there.
If VG had a good management team they would recognize the value of XCOR and buy it. It has just about everything VG needs to make a great Spaceshipthree, while they could finish the Lynx as an additional, and different, suborbital experience.
VG knows better
Only because they’ve already spent a boat load of money getting someone to build a propulsion system for them. VG buying XCOR’s engine even before the companies demise would have been a great “synergy”, much more so now (without the downside of funding a future competitor), IF they were still in the market. Bad timing is so common in this business…
XCOR was making nothing in VG’s class, their technology didn’t scale
and the secrecy made me doubt any of it’s utility.
There are other more capable space companies looking for the select few hires. I wonder where most of Firefly people ended up at ?
Good bye, XCor!…Space tourism is down to 2 companies now. Your half-finished hardware will end up on the auction block….Even I would be able to afford and make some auction bids if I wanted to.
Yes, I do deride you, XCor executives for being tech incompetents; you too, Jeff Greason.
You should have followed this mantra: keep it simple, stupid! You should have tried methods and hardware that had already been proven; Vertical launch, no wings, parachutes on capsules do work nicely going back 56 years, and no exotic propellants like VG uses to its regret.
Jacob, you’ve got me curious.
The unbounded arrogance you express towards people I have met and spoken with, and even argued with, seems, …strange. They are seldom stupid people. Indeed, one of those you deride has patents that have earned lots and lots over the years.
So, why do you bother to spew bile? Their accomplishments are greater than yours, and their humility, when speaking to me, has been rather consistent. What do you achieve by being derisory where there is so little cause for it?
He’s Canadian, Tom.
One definition of a troll is a faceless entity. Hmmmm?
American or Canadian trolls? You can have it. I would love to see Skype used on these comment pages.
That would only work if we were both awake and on the same comment thread at the same time. To be perfectly honest, I have no interest whatsoever in knowing what you look like. I have an equal lack of interest in wasting bandwidth spreading my own mug around the Web.
My analysis is that he’s a troll.
Would you prefer to meet me face-to-face? Or perhaps on Skype?
At ten paces, keyboards at the ready?
Stop being even more childish. Than usual.
Face-to-face.
I never met Jeff Greason, but his original dream was compelling: he desiring to fly above 99 percent of the atmosphere. Nothing wrong with that. The problem emerged was that he and the XCor team bit off more than they can chew. As others have stated here, winged spaceplanes have with few exceptions only brought grief.
Why did Jeff think he could avoid the pitfalls of developing a successful spaceplane where others failed, or set up circumstances that were lethal during development or flight?
I’m glad the Jeff and the XCor team didn’t get to the point of killing anybody, like another company did, but it only takes one flaw and one error in planning, development and testing to create an unforgiving and perilous circumstance. Human beings, no matter how intelligent or sufficient in education and degrees
still manage to OVERLOOK something or make MISTAKES that slip by their best intentions.
So tell me: do you think if Jeff had succeeded in completing and sending up the Lynx that if the SHTF, the pilot and passenger would have time to eject, or make a survivable, emergency dead-stick landing?
Do you think you could have hypothetically succeeded if you had and used the limited resources that XCor had?
And did I CONDEMN or did I SCOLD Jeff and his team? I certainly DID NOT condemn him.
Reading comprehension time, folks. “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.”
IE, they’re not yet dissolving the corporation and selling off assets, as some are assuming. This is not good, no. (My profound sympathy for everyone this affects, BTW.) But nor is it on the data available final.
I think most of us understand that. But we also understand that this statement you quoted is an attempt to put a positive spin on things. Will the IP be sold off? (“seeking other options”) – Certainly. Will XCOR be revived with all the employees rehired? – Not in a thousand years.
Well, if you’re an aerostructures engineer in Midland, comparable employment might be a little on the scarce side. If you’re a machinist or a welder, on the other hand, Midland is right in the middle of the fracking epicenter and blue-collar employment of all types is pretty easy to get.
Was. Not quite as great as a few years ago.
Yes, I know. But a few years ago the machinist want ads also used to pretty routinely say “some felonies okay.”
If only that were true. The jobs on offer mostly require prior experience in the oil industry. The ones that don’t are entry-level.
I’ve seen a few current want ads that have that “prior oil and gas experience” boilerplate in them even though the job descriptions are obviously entry-level. Say, for the sake of argument, that XCOR’s castoffs can’t find employment in Midland. Given that Midland’s population is at least 1/3 higher now than it was in 2010, it would seem that getting out from under a recently acquired lease or mortgage wouldn’t be much of a problem. There is definitely high-tech work to be had on the other side of the state. Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin are all booming.
Their best bet might be to go to Fort Worth since Lockheed is expanding its F-35 production line.
It looks like the folks in Midland are going to be talking to them about broken promises.
http://www.mrt.com/news/art…
Report: XCOR to lay off remaining employees
“It is a disappointment to learn about these layoffs that are being made by XCOR,” Brent Hilliard, chairman of the Midland Development Corp. board, said Wednesday. “The Midland Development Corp. has a meeting scheduled with XCOR at 1:30 p.m. (today) where these matters — along with other potential concerns that may arise out of the decision to lay off its employees — will be addressed.”
One matter likely to be addressed will be the economic development deal. In 2012, the city and XCOR agreed to a deal that moved XCOR’s corporate headquarters from California to Midland. The incentive package provided $2 million to the company for creating its headquarters in the Tall City, $3 million toward lease payments and capital improvements at an existing hangar and $5 million in performance incentives. The company, in turn, agreed to create an eventual payroll of $12 million in Midland and to invest at least $4 million in an existing hangar, according to a 2012 Reporter-Telegram article.”
Texas – Where aerospace companies move from CA to die? Firefly and now XCOR.
I’m only semi-serious, obviously it was not the primary reason, but perhaps it was a contributing factor? Perhaps the grass wasn’t as green as it looked?
Probably has more to do with the same suits they both had making important decisions…
I think that the demise of XCOR was entirely predictable. The way I see it, it was not so much the high risk and cost of developing new technology that forecast their failure. No secret about that. It was the hubris. They sold tickets for flights that were originally promised as being imminent. I inquired and they were still selling tickets as recently as May, 2017. Did any of these ticket buyers get their money back? Unilever spent millions on a huge program giving away 22 flights on the spaceplane XCOR never built. How about the damage done to their brand? Slick sales pitches by former COO Andrew Nelson failed to address the uncertainty and real lack of progress of XCOR’s technology. Midland, Texas and Camden County, Georgia have spent millions of taxpayer dollars because XCOR had a better hype machine than their flying machine turned out to be. Sooner or later, XCOR ran out of excuses and “other people’s money.”
Whenever I see an engine company want to become an airframer (XCOR) or an airframer want to become an engine company (VG) I get nervous. There’s a reason Rocketdyne/Aerojet were separate from Lockheed/Boeing/NG/etc. By the same token, there’s a reason why SpaceX started with an existing engine (Fastrac) when they decided to do both.
When an engine company is forced to become an airframer or an airframer is forced to become an engine maker, you perhaps have a point. These are not things one can be half-hearted about.
The reason engine makers are separate corporate entities from airframe makers is because that pattern was established early on in the aircraft industry and that’s the milieu from which all legacy aerospace majors are drawn. Simply put, it’s a habit. There’s no natural law at work that requires such an arrangement.
Elon Musk, after having been dissed by both the Russian and U.S. space establishments early on, decided his path forward had to include as close to zero dependence on “the usual suspects” as possible. That meant radical self-sufficiency.
Mr. Musk did not really start with FASTRAC, he started by recruiting the man who had designed FASTRAC, Tom Mueller. The early Merlins were a generation or more beyond FASTRAC because Mr. Mueller had continued work on his own after the various TRW projects were shelved. Several more Merlin generations have followed in quick succession. With Raptor well along, it seems SpaceX is now the regnant authority on high-performance LOX-hydrocarbon engine design and fabrication, having beaten American engine makers at their game and, now, Russian engine makers at theirs.
In structures and other rocket fitments, SpaceX has been almost equally path-breaking, being the first to use friction-stir welding on a large scale and having developed its own best-in-class heat shield material, PICA-X from a NASA-originated prototype. As with Mueller anent engines, Musk took the inventor of PICA – Dan Rasky – on-board and gave him a fast horse to ride.
In retrospect, it seems that XCOR, whose founders were engine-centric, underestimated what it was going to take to be an airframer as well. They neither subcontracted the whole job out nor, seemingly, found their own airframer equivalent of Tom Mueller or Dan Rasky. In the end, XCOR apparently couldn’t deliver on the engine side either.
Some more details on XCOR.
http://www.newswest9.com/st…
XCOR not shutting down in Midland
“There were online reports that all employees were being let go by the company. However, we’re told three employees will remain in Midland and will be paid on a contract basis. 10 other Midland employees have been let go as well as 11 others in California.”
and
“Blum said the company is in touch with the several hundred customers who have already bought space tickets.
We’re told there is no timetable on the completion of the Lynx Space project vehicle that would send people to space.”
You’re not going to do much with three employees besides keep the floors swept and answer phones.
Prob kept them on on the advice of the lawyers to satisfy some terms on the contract with those Midland folks.
No doubt.