Ah, that makes sense now. You guys didn’t announce
it on your site till several days later, and the
announcement was worded such that it made it appear
as though you hadn’t been declared sufficiently
complete till November 10th. I had remembered it
being the last day at Space Access, but when Sam
Dinkin mentioned the dates, it made me second guess
my memory. Cool, as I said though, it only more
thoroughly makes my point.

~Jon

The “sufficiently complete” letter from AST is dated 10/29/2003, and says they logged our application into their licensing system on 10/27/2003.

-R

That’s what I thought I remembered. But am I
doing my math wrong or getting the dates wrong?
Unless I’m screwing up somwhere isn’t April 23,
2004 less than 180 days after Nov 10, 2003.

That said, your info makes the point all the more
clear that Rutan’s accusation that AST was wasting
time on XCOR’s license that could have been spent
on Scaled’s is just silly. Had he actually tried
working with the AST even slightly in advance, he
could have avoided any schedule delays and cost
overruns. I’d love to see the AST launch license
process streamlined a bunch more (cause MSS is
going to be running that gauntlet in the next year
or so hopefully), and hopefully the provisions in
the new Commercial Space Launch bill that was
passed last year for Experimental Licenses will
help. We’ll have to see, no?

~Jon

And I can’t for the life of me get a recording of the meeting. CSPAN isn’t showing it, and I can’t get the webcasts to run.

Yeah, AST backburnered them while they were working on SS1’s license, and only got back to XCOR’s application sometime in early April 2004, IIRC.

~Jon

While I respect Rutan’s accomplishments a lot, his quote is quite misleading. When Rutan finally got his act together and decided to get a launch license, AST more or less completely sidelined XCOR’s work until they were done with Rutan’s, specifically because Rutan had flyable hardware. XCOR’s work on getting a launch license in no way (to my knowledge) impeded or slowed down Scaled’s launch license application. Burt basically drug his feet and tried getting around the launch license requirement until he finally realized that the government really wasn’t going to let him fly unless he got one. Then he descended on AST and pushed his application through. When that happened, AST had to pull pretty much all of its people off of the XCOR license and throw them at Burt’s license. Had he actually tried in even the slightest manner to work with the AST in advance, he would have had a much better time. In fact, I’m willing to bet that XCOR’s pioneering work in the area actually helped speed up their application, not slow it down.

~Jon