Mojave, CA, April 27, 2002: XCOR Aerospace announced today that it has demonstrated its first bread-board prototype for a reciprocating piston pump. Key components to many rocket engines are pumps for fuel and oxidizer. This prototype development took less than four weeks from initial design to demonstration of pumping pressures and flow rate appropriate to XCOR's current XR-4A3 engines installed on the EZ-Rocket.

"This is one step on the road to pump-fed rocket engines for affordable space transportation," said XCOR Chief Engineer and co-founder Dan DeLong. "Thus far during testing, we have been pleased with the pump's performance. The reciprocating pump design for this prototype has many advantages over current rocket engine pumps. For instance, it can be stopped and started very quickly. Currently turbo pumps are used on many larger rocket engines but they don't scale down to smaller engines and can be extremely costly."

XCOR expects to continue development on this design and plans to test future pump designs on its rocket engines and vehicles. The company also plans to sell its pump designs to other commercial and government clients.

Video of the pump and XCOR rocket engines are available at http://www.xcor.com/video.html