Rocketplane's Majority Owner Buys Kistler

The majority owner of Rocketplane Limited, Inc., an Oklahoma City, Okla.-based company building a reusable space plane for the suborbital tourism market, is adding Kistler Aerospace to his portfolio and initially intends to use its design for a reusable orbital vehicle to compete for business from NASA such as delivering supplies to the international space station...

French, who was an early investor in Kistler when it was started more than a decade ago, described it as an established company with mature engineering designs, and a substantial amount of hardware that has already been manufactured at several sites around the United States including parts built by Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.

Indeed...they have some very nice tanks in storage at Michoud.

He said Kistler, which had raised more than $600 million in financing before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2003, has solid technology but that the company was unable to get to the flight stage because of financing problems that arose after the late 1990s financial crisis in Asia that affected some of its investors and the impact of the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on financial markets.

Notice what financial setback isn't mentioned...

Posted by T.L. James on March 1, 2006 11:31 PM