XCOR Aerospace, a company that for nearly 20 years had been working on rocket engines and a suborbital spaceplane, filed for bankruptcy Nov. 8 after it was unable to line up new investors.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...