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To most people, Kitty Hawk, NC, was just a wasteland
But to two brothers who were bicycle mechanics from Dayton, OH, it was perfect
Absolutely perfect The steady breeze
The shortened runway They had soft sand for landing
Those same elements are alive and well in Mojave today
We have access to a piece of airspace that's a national treasure
That's about 200 nautical miles by 200 nautical miles
and it goes from the surface essentially to the moon
I don't know of another place that has that type of geography in this industry anywhere
on earth We have a decided advantage just because of
our location right here in Mojave, plus we have the right attitude in the aerospace valley
that this is just what we do In Mojave, we have this cluster of highly
talented, innovative people They're still fifth graders in a lot of ways
They don't know what they can't do And so they're not afraid to try things
And they try things everyday that don't work in hopes that they'll try something that does
work It's more of a mindset, it's more of a what's
inside that's driving these people Jeff Greason, he was co-patentholder of the
Intel Pentium III chip. What credentials does he have to come to Mojave, set up shop, and
become a rocket scientist of a leading sub-orbital and orbital systems developer?
Well, the same argument could be made of Orville and Wilbur.
What on earth did two bicycle builders have in terms of credentials to build the first
vehicle to engage in flight, and then powered flight?
The goal of XCOR is to try to bring the cost and frequency of space transportation to a
point where we can make economic use of space. Lynx is our name of the suborbital spacecraft
that we're developing and have been for a number of years
It's a small ship that takes the pilot and one person
or the pilot and a payload from the runway up into the space environment and back down
to land again Our work is inspired by the same ethos that
fueled Silicon Valley in its early days and that competitive but also collaborative atmosphere
drives us all to move more swiftly That is that "Wright Brothers Effect" carried
into several different organizations on the flight-line
And when you look in the eyes of people like George Whitesides
George could have probably been successful in any one of fifty industries just like Jeff
Greason But they chose this one
The mission of *** Galactic is to open space for the rest of us
So our aspiration is to bring the price down of space access and to open up the space experience
to dramatically more people around the world Right now our company is doing two different
things One is we're trying to finish flight tests
for our SpaceShipTwo vehicle which will bring thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands
of people into space And we're also building a new small satellite
launch vehicle called LauncherOne which will take small satellites up into orbit
Mojave is the perfect place for us because it is the center of aerospace entrepreneurial
development If you go around the world, there's really
nowhere else you can design, build, install, and test space equipment all in the same place
Literally Mojave is the only place in the world that I think you can do all of those
things at once It's very simple
We now have seventeen companies We have nineteen rocket test sites
We have a hundred and fifty five basic contracts with different firms
This is the first time in the history of this airport in forty years that the space industry
now generates fifty percent of our total revenue And that's a big deal
Kevin Mickey grew up in this town and now he's back as the President and CEO of Scaled
Composites He carries on that legacy and, if you will,
was passed a baton by Burt Rutan and now look what's going on at Scaled.
We excel at rapid prototyping and flight tests What we pursue is major milestone breakthrough
projects and that can be in aviation or now in space
Our most recent program is the program that you see behind us called Stratolaunch
And the program is to create the world's largest wingspan airplane
that would carry a booster to roughly 30,000 feet
Drop that off and then the booster would take payloads or passengers on to space
The enemy of innovation is the intolerance for risk and some failure
And the Mojave Air & Space Port with our partner Stu Witt, the general manager of the airport
He's created an environment out here where we can do things in a way that you couldn't
do them anywhere else in the country
There's only one way to be totally safe
And that's stop But where does that put humanity?
There's something in the human spirit that wants to be a part of something bigger than
themselves We can't lose sight of that
And that's where this industry is It would be very easy to just accept the fact
that we went to the moon, in my lifetime and in my lifetime, we abandoned the moon
I'm not willing to accept that Something is happening here
You can feel it There's just a crackle
There's something in the air I want to be able to look people in the eye
and say "I was there, were you?"