XCOR Aerospace
American private rocket engine and spaceflight development company
XCOR Aerospace was an American private spaceflight and rocket engine development company based at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, California, Midland International Air and Spaceport in Midland, Texas and the Amsterdam area, the Netherlands. XCOR was formed in 1999 by former members of the Rotary Rocket rocket engine development team, and ceased operations in 2017.
By 2015, XCOR was headed by CEO John "Jay" Gibson, who remained CEO until June 2017.
XCOR Aerospace was the parent operation, concerned with engineering and building spaceships and had two main subdivisions within it; XCOR Space Expeditions provided marketing and sales, and XCOR Science had been set up to conduct scientific and educational payload flights.
By May 2016, XCOR was laying off staff and in 2017, XCOR closed their doors for good and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
History
The company was founded in Mojave, California in 1999 by Jeff Greason, Dan DeLong, Aleta Jackson and Doug Jones
who had previously worked at the Rotary Rocket company.
In 2001, XCOR designed and built EZ-Rocket, the first privately built and flown rocket-powered airplane. EZ-Rocket made its maiden flight in July 2001.
XCOR moved its development and manufacturing operations to Midland, Texas from July 2012 to 2015. The company uses the Mojave Air and Space port primarily to conduct test flights.
The public source identifies “XCOR Aerospace” as american private rocket engine and spaceflight development company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around XCOR, Aerospace and American.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “XCOR Aerospace”, the useful work is to connect “american private rocket engine and spaceflight development company” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3570347. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2017, 2015 and 2016.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “XCOR Aerospace”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow XCOR Aerospace primary sources, XCOR Aerospace archive and XCOR research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “XCOR Aerospace”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “XCOR Aerospace” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.