The dream of reviving winged space flight is close to reality as employees at Sierra Space put the finishing touches on its Dream Chaser craft in the company’s Louisville facility and get it ready to send to NASA for final tests before a launch planned for 2024.
The 15-foot cargo module that will attach to the end of the 30-foot Dream Chaser is already undergoing tests at the Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio. The spacecraft will follow soon, said Sierra Space officials, who are keeping a close wrap on the timing and logistics because of security concerns.
The Dream Chaser’s first mission for NASA will be to ferry supplies to the International Space Station and bring back items. The craft, which won’t have a crew, will be the second to ride atop United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan Centaur rocket, following the rocket’s scheduled debut on Christmas Eve.
Angie Wise, Sierra Space’s chief safety officer and senior vice president for mission assurance, said the company is working with NASA on a launch date. The Dream Chaser, named Tenacity, will take off from Kennedy Space Center and return there, landing on its runway, similar to the space shuttle, the new craft’s winged predecessor.
“Wings are back,” Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice said Monday to members of the media who got a look at the nearly ready-to-roll Dream Chaser.
Asked when people might fly on the craft, Vice said, “Right now we’re focused on getting a crewed Dream Chaser read in the 2026 timeframe.”
While the Dream Chaser’s design evokes NASA’s space shuttle, it is roughly one-quarter the size of that vehicle.
“More than a decade ago, space shuttle Atlantis touched ground for the last time at Kennedy Space Center. That was the end of an era, 30 years of shuttle flights,” Sierra Space General Manager Steve Berroth told hundreds of employees gathered for a picture with Dream Chaser on a platform in the background.
Not far away was a second platform where work has started on a composite, constructed by Lockheed Martin, that will soon be the second Dream Chaser.
“You should be proud you’re bringing back winged space flight,” Berroth said.
Sierra Space, spun off by the Sierra Nevada Corp. in 2021, has been developing Dream Chaser for several years. In 2016, NASA selected Sierra Space as one of the companies to take supplies to the International Space Station. The company’s multimillion-dollar contract is for a minimum of seven missions.
“It’s been a dream. Today it’s nice to see that we moved from just dreaming to finishing up doing,” Vice said. “It’s been a lifelong project for many, many people.”
At one point, Sierra Space was eyeing 2020 as its possible first launch. Vice said like a lot of companies, Sierra Space ran into supply-chain holdups during the coronavirus pandemic.
There were also processes that added time, such as using “greener” fuel for the craft. The company will use rocket propellant 1, a highly refined kerosene that is less hazardous than hypergolic propellants typically used for spacecraft. Vice said crews will be able to walk up to a vehicle on the runway without having to wear hazardous-materials suits.
Sierra Space expects work on the next Dream Chasers to go more quickly in part because the company is producing several items in-house, including thrusters, harnesses, thermal tiles for the outside of the craft and the solar arrays. Vice said the second Dream Chaser will likely be about 50% less expensive to build.
The second craft will also take less time to complete, Wise said. Work has started on the second cargo module. It’s not clear how many flights each Dream Chaser will make, but Wise said each one is designed for a minimum of 15 missions.
When the craft returns to Earth, it will stay at the Kennedy Flight Center. The Dream Chaser can carry up to 12,000 pounds of payload. The cargo module will be used to dispose of items from the space station and will burn up on reentry.
Sierra Space is using a to-scale mock-up of the Dream Chaser to train astronauts how to load and unload cargo. The astronauts will hitch rides to the space station on SpaceX or Russian Soyuz rockets, said Krista Abler, who is leading the training for the crews.
Sierra Space employees will monitor the mission and the Dream Chaser from a mission control center in the same building where the craft was built and the astronauts are trained.
“It will all come together for us here in this room about 27 hours before launch,” said Jeff Davis, flight director and vice president of flight operations.
The Sierra Space mission control center looks like NASA’s mission control room in Houston. “That’s by design. We’re not reinventing the wheel here,” Davis said.
The Sierra Space team includes members with backgrounds in flight operations at NASA and other companies, such as SpaceX and Northrop Grumman. The control center will be staffed around the clock.
Employees will be in touch with United Launch Alliance, which is based in Centennial, and NASA. Davis said the team will intently watch for the craft’s solar arrays and wings to unfold after it’s launched into space.
The next big event will be lining Tenacity up with the space station. A robotic arm on the station will grab onto the vehicle. The craft’s cargo module will hook up to the space station and stay there for 45 days. The mission will be roughly 50 days.
Because this is the Dream Chaser’s first mission, Tenacity will be put through various tasks to demonstrate its abilities, Davis said. Sierra Space has worked with the Federal Aviation Administration to clear the way for its landing at the Kennedy Space Center.
“The preparations to come home, as they say, will be another challenging and exciting part of the mission,” Davis said. “There aren’t many spacecraft that have flown down through Earth’s atmosphere with wings and landed on a runway. We need to make sure that the vehicle is in great shape, that we’ve really looked at the weather very carefully and that everything looks good for targeting a particular landing site in Florida on a particular orbit.”
Among the Dream Chaser’s features extolled by Sierra Space is that people and cargo won’t have to splash down into the ocean. The vehicle’s “g-forces,” or gravitational forces, are much lower on reentry than on a capsule. That makes it easier for any science experiments on board, Wise said.
Vice wasn’t bashful about the advent of the company’s Dream Chaser era. He told the Sierra Space employees who’ve been working on the spacecraft, putting in long hours and working nights and weekends, that the Dream Chaser is “revolutionary.” What Sierra Space calls a “space plane” is part of the company’s vision of advancing commerce hundreds of miles above Earth that includes building a space station.
“This will change how we travel from Earth to space and back again. It will change everything,” Vice said.
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