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."

FMI: www.xcor.com