The US Federal Aviation Administration and the US Air Force (USAF) have jointly hosted a summit for twelve entrepreneurial reusable launch vehicle (RLV) developers in Colorado Springs on 9 April.
The RLV developers who attended were Space Exploration Technologies, XCOR Aerospace, Rocketplane Kistler, Armadillo Aerospace, AirLaunch, Transformational Space, Benson Space, Starchaser Industries, TGV Rockets, Masten Space Systems, Andrews Space and Technology and SpeedUp.
The RLV developers and USAF officials, including the Air Force's under secretary Ronald Sega and commander of space command General Kevin Chilton, met to discuss how the entrepreneurial sector could address the military's space access requirements with their planned commercial space flight services.
The FAA’s office of commercial space transportation associate administrator Patricia Grace Smith also attended the event.
A summit aim was to establish a regularly scheduled channel of communication between the entrepreneurial sector and the USAF. This would be used by the USAF to measure the entrepreneurs' progress on their space services and vehicles' development.
"It looks like the summit will become an annual thing for peolple to talk about their progress," says Starchaser Industries chief executive Steven Bennett.
Source: FlightGlobal.com