SPEAKING AS A (SMALL) XCOR INVESTOR, THIS IS SAD: The XCOR Lynx Spaceplane Might Be Down for the Count. On the other hand, I was most interested in the engine business, which is going well. “In March, XCOR entered into a contract with the behemoth United Launch Alliance, the Boeing-Lockheed partnership that launches lots of military satellites, to develop a new rocket engine that uses liquid hydrogen. ULA is building a launch system called Vulcan that needs an upper stage. It is looking for a solution from private space, from Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and from XCOR, as well as from entrenched engine providers like Aerojet Rocketdyne. This alliance may have killed the impetus to build a spacecraft at all, now that XCOR has a revenue stream coming from the engine work. A less ambitious (but revenue-generating) project has usurped the larger, grander, and riskier scheme.”