I spoke with the Air space mangers office today to see what is going on with our LOA, since we seemed to be on track last month when I spoke to him. It seems we have hit yet ANOTHER delay, and once again it has nothing to do with us specifically. Apparently there is a change of command ceremony (our LOA has to be signed at a pretty high level), and hopefully the new person will be signing paperwork again starting next week.

What does this mean for us? Well unfortunately it means yet another month that we will have to launch with MDARS. Why is this you might ask? Well, on order to launch ourselves we need to get an FAA waiver for each launch, and we need to do that about a month in advance of the launch. We can’t get that waiver however without an LOA in place with the local airspace.

Hopefully the next update on this is that we have our LOA, but until then we will continue to launch with MDARS, who has been more than gracious enough to share their day and equipment with us at no charge.