In article ,
(ChuckPilot) wrote:

In article , Ralph Jones
writes:

Are you sure they're working on a 163?

See the link below.

http://www.xcor.com/me163.html

XCOR is developing high reliability, low cost rocket engines for
non-government applications. It's all very well to show a rocket on the
lab bench, but it's a much bigger deal to actually integrate one into an
aircraft. They floated the idea of building an ME163 or Bell X1 replica
for someone, and the CEO (Jeff Greason) also asked in this newsgroup
whether anyone was interested in rocket launch for their glider. They
didn't get any takers, so instead they fitted their rocket engines to a
Long-EZ belonging to one of their engineers, producing the EZ-Rocket.

The EZ-Rocket was shown (static display) at Oshkosh in 2001 and had two
demonstration flights at Oshkosh 2002.

XCOR are now working on larger engines and a custom aircraft capable of
carrying two people to 100+ km altitude.

-- Bruce
worked on the XCOR stand at Oshkosh 2002