Three of the four founders of spaceflight firm XCOR Aerospace have set up a new venture called Agile Aero. XCOR’s CTO Jeff Greason, chief engineer Dan DeLong and chief technician Aleta Jackson left in November, 16 years after founding the business that is now focused on developing the Lynx space tourism rocketplane.
Three of the four founders of spaceflight firm XCOR Aerospace have set up a new venture called Agile Aero.
XCOR’s CTO Jeff Greason, chief engineer Dan DeLong and chief technician Aleta Jackson left in November, 16 years after founding the business that is now focused on developing the Lynx space tourism rocketplane.
Their new venture Agile Aero is focused on rapid prototyping to speed up the development of new launch vehicles. It plans to solve the logjams that have afflicted XCOR and similar companies.
Explaining the business to SatelliteFinance, Greason said: “Our focus is on creating a business to business service – the service of creating quickly a high performance aerospace vehicle that meets the requirements of a customer company.”
“We might also do our own vehicles someday, but that is further in the future. In the very near term we also expect to do some consulting while developing that core capability of rapid vehicle prototyping in real physical form.”
Greason said that Agile is looking to invent “a new way of rapidly developing aerospace vehicles”, and that it had yet to decide what its first creation could be used for.
“Sources of capital who are willing to invest in a certain market niche can influence that decision,” he said.
According to a statement on Agile Aero’s website, “many advanced aerospace projects falter because of the long development cycle for custom aerospace vehicles.”
“Recent years have seen breakthroughs in the rapid development and the prototyping of rocket engines, satellites, and many subsystems for advanced vehicles – but integrated vehicles are still developed with traditional slow methods,” the company said.
Agile Aero’s founders believe their experience can help remedy this and plan to share their expertise with other space startups. The growing list of ventures developing vehicles for applications ranging from space tourism to small satellite launches include the UK’s Virgin Galactic, Switzerland’s S3, and US-based Stratolaunch.
Patrick Wood, CEO of British small satellite maker SSTL, spoke about the buzz surrounding the launch industry in an interview for SatelliteFinance’s upcoming print edition.
“From my point of view, responsive space, the ability to launch missions very rapidly at low cost, will be one of those exciting technology areas which will again change the economics of space and drive us into a different direction and a different price point on constellations,” Wood said.
He said a shift in the smallsat sector from slow moving, one-off government projects to the commercial market with rapid, large-scale constellations has come amid a need for investors to make fast returns on their investments.
Greason, DeLong and Jackson founded XCOR alongside Doug Jones – still at XCOR as chief test engineer – having formerly worked on a similar reusable launcher project at Rotary Rocket Company, which ultimately ran out of funds and closed down in 2001.
XCOR’s first vehicle, the EZ-Rocket, was the first privately built and flown rocket-powered airplane, making its maiden flight in mid-2001. The firm has subsequently focused on developing Lynx.
To fund its development, XCOR has undertaken a number of private financing rounds. In January 2014 it announced it had raised US$14.2m in a series B funding round of preferred shares. It is understood that XCOR then secured a further US$5m in May 2015 from Chinese venture fund Haiyin Capital. That investment came shortly after Greason stepped down as CEO and was replaced by Jay Gibson, the former assistant secretary of the US Air Force.
