WASHINGTON — Sierra Space has accomplished assembly of its first Dream Chaser vehicle because it goals for a launch of that spacecraft to the International Space Station as soon as next spring.
The corporate announced Nov. 2 the completion of the primary Dream Chaser, named Tenacity, at its facility in Louisville, Colorado. The vehicle might be shipped within the “coming weeks” to NASA’s Neil A. Armstrong Test Facility, the previous Plum Brook Facility, in Ohio for environmental testing.
In development in a single form or one other for well over a decade, Dream Chaser is meant to initially function a cargo transportation vehicle, ferrying supplies and experiments to and from the ISS. It’ll launch on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket from Cape Canaveral and return to Space Florida’s Launch and Landing Facility runway on the Kennedy Space Center.
Once at NASA’s Armstrong facility, Dream Chaser will undergo environmental testing in that center’s large thermal vacuum chamber. Ken Shields, senior director business development of in-space R&D, manufacturing and emerging markets at Sierra Space, said on the American Astronautical Society’s von Braun Space Exploration Symposium Oct. 27 that he expected that those tests can be accomplished and Dream Chaser shipped to Cape Canaveral by the tip of the yr.
Sierra Space has not disclosed a goal launch date for that first Dream Chaser mission, but Shields said that mission is currently planned for launch “a while in March.” That date will depend not only on the readiness of Dream Chaser itself but in addition the Vulcan launch vehicle. The launch might be the second flight of Vulcan, after an inaugural launch in late December of Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander.
Dream Chaser has a minimum of seven missions to the ISS under a Business Resupply Services 2 contract award in 2016. Along with the cargo version of Dream Chaser, Sierra Space has plans for a crewed version, reviving the concept it previously worked on for NASA’s industrial crew program but was not chosen by the agency for development in 2014. A separate version of the vehicle may be developed for unspecified national security applications.
Dream Chaser is one among Sierra Space’s primary contributions, together with inflatable habitation modules, for the Orbital Reef industrial space station concept being developed with Blue Origin and other firms. Executives of each firms say they continue to be committed to work together on Orbital Reef despite reports of tensions between the 2 and Blue Origin shifting resources from Orbital Reef to other projects.
“Blue Origin has a heavy-lift vehicle in Latest Glenn. We now have a transportation system for crew and cargo with Dream Chaser. We’re working together to construct an area station,” Janet Kavandi, president and chief science officer of Sierra Space, said during a panel at AIAA’s ASCEND conference Oct. 24. “It’s a really complementary system. It really works out rather well, making the most of all those different capabilities.”