Former Banker Says Company's Safety Record Speaks For
Itself
Building rocket-powered vehicles to take people into space is
not the usual career path for a Boston-based investment banker...
but Andrew Nelson is not your ordinary gray-suited executive. A
competitive sailor, Nelson has long charted his own course, and
believes his future lies with Mojave, CA-based aerospace firm XCOR
Aerospace.
Nelson recently left a banking and aerospace consulting career
that spanned Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, and Booz Allen and
Hamilton for XCOR. As unlikely as such a career move may seem, XCOR
marks a return to Nelson's high-technology roots. His first job was
as an engineer with Pan Am World Services at Cape Canaveral. He
later focused on technical and regulatory issues in the aviation
and space sectors at MITRE Corporation. He earned a Bachelor of
Science degree in electrical engineering at Ohio University, and
his MBA at MIT's Sloan School of Management.
"XCOR was founded on the idea that a small team of dedicated,
talented individuals can innovate and develop products much faster
than larger, more conventional organizations," said XCOR CEO and
co-founder Jeff Greason. "Andrew fits in well and understands the
aerospace industry and the world of finance."
"Success on Wall Street depends upon finding opportunities and
solutions for our clients before anyone else does," said Nelson.
"You have to examine technology and developments for critical
trends, then you must determine which firm is best poised to take
advantage of the opportunities created by these market changes.
XCOR has such a team."
Nelson believes the space access market will create many
opportunities and cited studies that say the market for suborbital
space tourism, scientific research, commercial and government
markets will approach $1.2 billion by 2012.
"Nine years ago, we founded XCOR in the belief that we could
make space access affordable, and that the first step was to build
safe, reliable and reusable rocket engines," Greason said. "The
team has designed, built and fired 10 different rocket engine
designs logging over 3,500 starts. That experience will be put to
use building vehicles that will provide ordinary people safer and
more affordable access to space."
"During all our hours of running our rocket engines, we have
never had a chamber burst; our safety features have never failed to
protect our personnel; and our engines have never caused a minute
of lost time injury," Greason added. "In addition, while most
rocket engines are designed to work for just one flight, ours are
built to last. Our 4K14 rocket engine chamber has run 486 times and
it is still going strong. That level of durability translates into
better safety for our clients, as well as lower cost operations and
superior financial results."
XCOR recently celebrated a milestone, with hundreds of thousand
of attendees at EAA AirVenture 2008 witnessing the first public
flights of the XCOR-powered Rocket Racing League aircraft.
"The spectators not only got a good show, they witnessed the
result of the meticulous safety-focused planning and contingency
analysis that go into every XCOR operation," Nelson said. "This
approach is being followed in the quest to build and operate our
third generation XCOR craft, the Lynx, which will safely take
people up to the edge of space and back up to four times a
day."