Production of a successor to NASA’s space shuttle will get underway in Colorado and will be overseen by a former U.S. Air Force pilot and astronaut who piloted two shuttle flights and commanded another three.
For the past few years, Steve Lindsey has overseen the design, development and testing of the Dream Chaser, a spacecraft that will be built by Sierra Nevada Corp. at its Space Systems operations in Louisville. In December, NASA declared production a “go” after the craft passed a critical review.
The Dream Chaser’s first trip is scheduled for late 2020 at the earliest when it will take supplies, science experiments and other cargo to the International Space Station. The plans are for Centennial-based United Launch Alliance to launch the craft atop an Atlas 5 rocket from Florida’s Cape Canaveral and for the craft to use the runway there on its return.
There won’t be a crew.
“What we completed in December was a critical design review,” said Lindsey, vice president of Sierra Nevada’s space exploration systems. “It’s a really hard milestone to get to and through. It was the culmination of literally hundreds of smaller critical design reviews by subsystems and systems.”
In 2016, NASA selected Sierra Nevada, SpaceX and Orbital ATK, later acquired by Northrop Grumman, as contractors under its Commercial Resupply Service 2 program to take supplies to the space station. Sierra Nevada’s multi-million-dollar contract is for a minimum of six missions.
Sierra Nevada spokeswoman Kimberly Schwandt declined to disclose the specific financial terms of the contract awarded to Sierra Nevada, a privately run company.
The Dream Chaser will be the only winged spacecraft flying to the space station, harking back to the space shuttle’s design.
Sierra Nevada hopes to eventually send a Dream Chaser with a crew into orbit. The company has a model for that on display in a large room with all-glass walls just off the main lobby of one of its buildings in Louisville. The sleek, winged vehicle was built to carry crews and is the basis for the Dream Chaser that will launch in a couple of years.
The craft is the same size as the Dream Chaser and has the same flight controls, but wasn’t designed to go into orbit. It was designed for test flights and has successfully completed the kind of runway landing the Dream Chaser will make on re-entry.
The Dream Chaser will be owned and operated by Sierra Nevada, in keeping with the public-private partnerships NASA has undertaken to deliver cargo and crews to the space station.
“NASA is no longer making spacecrafts. They’re seeking out private companies as partners,” said John Roth, vice president of business development for Sierra Nevada Space Systems.
Roth said the partnerships are good for the public because it should save the government billions of dollars. It’s good for private companies, he added, because they can spin off the technology and use the vehicles for other commercial ventures.
Space Systems is one of the business divisions of Sierra Nevada, based in Sparks, Nev. Sierra Nevada started as a small technology company and employs more than 3,500 people across the country and in England, Germany and Turkey, who work in the areas of space, aviation, national security and defense.
Sierra Nevada is expanding its 600-member workforce in Louisville. It employs more than 800 people in its Centennial office.
The space program became Sierra Nevada’s second-largest division after it bought smaller space-related companies, including MicroSat Systems, which Roth headed. The smaller companies brought with them more than 30 years of experience and involvement with more than 450 space missions.
The excitement around Dream Chaser has spread beyond the company’s space division, Roth said. “It’s really energizing the entire workforce.”
The Dream Chaser will be about 30 feet long, roughly one-quarter the size of the space shuttles, which were designed with a more spacious cargo hold to accommodate parts for building the space station and the Hubble telescope. But the Dream Chaser’s design is such that it will be able to carry close to the volume the shuttle could, Lindsey said. It’s designed to carry up to roughly 12,000 pounds.
And the new craft’s wings aren’t as big as the space shuttle’s. Most of the lift is created by its underside, which is wide and flat. Lindsey said a big advantage of what’s called a lifting-body spacecraft is that the “g-forces,” or gravitational forces, are much lower during re-entry than on a capsule. The craft can land on a runway rather than have to splash down in the ocean like a capsule. Re-entry at lower gravitational forces is much easier on any science experiments on board that were conducted in zero gravity, Lindsey said.
Lockheed Martin is building the craft’s composite structure at a site in Fort Worth, Texas. The craft is designed to be used up to 15 times.
Dream Chaser was born out of operations worthy of a spy novel. In 1982, an Australian Air Force plane snapped photos of a Soviet trawler pulling what looked like a spacecraft out of the ocean and gave the photos to the CIA. The CIA notified NASA, which used the photos in a feat of reverse engineering to build a model of the Soviet BOR-4. From that, NASA constructed a horizontal-landing vehicle, the HL-20.
The original mock-up of the HL-20 is on display at the Wings over the Rockies Air and Space Museum in Denver. NASA was going to use the craft to transport crew back and forth from the space station, but ended the effort in about 1995, Lindsey said.
“The project then sat on the shelf. And then in 2006 or so, our company went and said we were interested in doing this,” Lindsey said.
“We took (NASA’s) original design and did a huge amount of work on it and created what you see today, which was the Dream Chaser,” Lindsey added.
Now that NASA works with the Russians in space, U.S. engineers have talked to Russian engineers about their technology that became the Dream Chaser.
“They were excited that we were taking it to the next level,” Lindsey said.
The work on Dream Chaser as well as Sierra Nevada’s experience with satellite systems, propulsion and environmental control systems are helping guide the design of what the company calls the Lunar Gateway. The project with NASA is intended as the beginning of lunar exploration or an outpost for long space trips, such as a mission to Mars.
Lindsey’s last space trip was in 2011 on the shuttle Discovery, which also logged its last trip that mission. He was the pilot on Discovery’s 1998 trip that legendary astronaut John Glenn, at age 77, joined, making him the oldest man to fly in space.
Lindsey retired in 2011 from NASA, where he had also served as chief of the astronaut corps and chief of the International Space Station operations for the astronaut office. He liked what Sierra Nevada was doing with the Dream Chaser.
“I came up here and interviewed. I basically took the vehicle apart to find out what was wrong with it and couldn’t find anything and decided they had a good concept,” Lindsey said. “I felt like I wanted to be in a place where I could contribute and use everything I had learned.”
During his interview with Sierra Nevada, Lindsey was asked if he would be willing to fly the Dream Chaser.
“I was really taken aback. I wasn’t even thinking about that,” Lindsey. “But I don’t think I will. I think somebody younger” will.
Age didn’t stop John Glenn, someone reminds him.
“That’s true. I’m sure if John was still here he’d want to fly it,” Lindsey said. “Actually, he told me he wanted to fly it.”
