Dream Chaser has been a bit of a joke in the aerospace circles I inhabit. It has crushed far more dreams than it has successfully chased... Sierra is possibly one of the worst, most broken aerospace companies to work for in existence, likely number two behind Boeing. If you want to feel good about your job, go read their glassdoor reviews.
It is preparing for its first actual flight, since so far the closest it’s gotten to an actual flight is being dropped from a helicopter from about 3700 meters. It crash-landed when one of its landing wheels failed to deploy correctly.
I love the idea of private aerospace, but we need to be realistic about the complexity and difficulty of trans-atmospheric / gravitationally dominated ballistic flight as an endeavour.
This spacecraft may very well become a safe, economical option for short haul cargo and crew missions to and from earth to orbit… but let’s not breathlessly declare that it’s preparing to visit the ISS when we haven’t even burned any of them up yet testing the reentry capability of this adorable cessna-sized space minivan.
It’s not a good look for companies in the aerospace segment to wildly overstate their operational capabilities, and if that’s what is needed to attract investment, maybe we should figure out a better way.
For starters, the test you mentioned happened in 2013, after making improvements, they successfully redid that test in 2017.
Visiting the ISS does not involve the reentry capability, and being a test flight, on the journey back, they won't be attempting to bring down any cargo they can't afford to lose. They're saying it's preparing to visit the ISS because that literally is the objective of the first test flight. Maybe they've pulled a Boeing and it has too many issues to make it there, but the only way to find out is to actually launch it and attempt to head there and back.
As for carrying crew, that's still far away, they don't have a commercial crew contract from NASA, and are instead working with Blue Origin to provide transportation to their commercial space station. Given Blue's rate of getting things done so far, this is probably going to materialize well into the 2030s, if it materializes at all.
Crazy to imagine that we lost all these technologies. 60 years ago we could have a phone call to the moon, we had a space shuttle, etc, and now struggling just to get a small copy reaching the ISS.
Whenever you think like this, it's useful to look into how modern efforts differ in more detail.
Concorde was very loud and very fuel inefficient in an industry where efficiency is king, the modern struggle is not in achieving supersonic flight, but in doing it efficiently and quietly.
Similarly, the space shuttle was iconic, but more recent safety analyses have shown that it was a miracle only 2 launches resulted in total loss of crew, as initially it had a 1 in 9 chance of failure, later missions getting to 1 in 90. In comparison, all current human rated vehicles have to do better than 1 in 270. The Shuttle was also horrendously expensive, reusable in name only, and was limited heavily by requirements for it to be able to do certain things that it never actually ended up doing. Dreamchaser is supposed to be commercially viable, it can't burn billions per launch.
Similarly, with going to the Moon. We want to do more than just an Apollo style moonshot and establish a sustainable long term presence there (well, NASA wants to do more than that, Congress seems to just want to give money to Boeing), so now we have to make giant, spacious sci-fi-esque landers/bases that refuel in orbit before heading off.
> initially it had a 1 in 9 chance of failure, later missions getting to 1 in 90
Interesting. I didn't know that it improved so much during the project lifetime. Was it due to a few single changes or a bunch of tiny improvements moving the needle only in aggregate by that much?
> The improvement is apparently due to the changes made in response to Challenger and Columbia
A purely technical discussion on the problems that could down a Shuttle ignores the meta problem of poor risk analysis by the Shuttle managers. Basically they normalised deviance[0], in effect deciding that a technical problem wasn't an issue because they got away with it previously. This intrinsic weakness did not go away after the Challenger loss (hence Columbia [1]). Arguably, the only reason there wasn't another fatal loss was that the programme was grounded before after another accident could occur.
The analyses leading to the loss estimates I mentioned were done in 2010, shortly before the Shuttle's retirement, due to recognition of the previously poor risk analyses. As is clear from the issues seen with Starliner, this normalization of deviance has been significantly reduced, in that it doesn't seem to affect the newer style of contracting. Both Dragon and Starliner have had to scrub launches and make fixes for things that would be considered to not be a big deal if they weren't carrying humans, and are expected to review and justify any deviation from expectations even if it was fine previously.
We're seeing plenty of normalization of deviance with SLS and Orion though. There were the issues with various backup systems and IIRC no life support in Artemis 1, with issues with the heat shield only recently being made public, yet Artemis 2 is intended to carry a crew. So I would not be surprised if Congress only finally gives up on that waste when they cause another crew to be killed and can blame NASA instead of themselves.
I would guess that some of the improvement was from operational changes following from more realistic risk analysis, and the gradual acceptance that the space shuttles would never live up to the expectations behind that name.
The widespread opinion is that the Space Shuttle was a colossal blunder and diverted a huge amount of funding into a dead end program, and misled a great amount of engineers all over the world, to the point where national programs had huge versatile spaceplanes in the plans (some still do! mostly in the zombie mode though). A fleet of specialized spacecraft could have been way more productive than a jack of all trades and master of none. Productive in absolutely every sense - output-wise, job-wise, infractructure-wise, innovation-wise, sustainability-wise.
Shuttle was a political artifact and the reason behind the downturn (or at least one of the factors), not a victim of it. DC is a niche spacecraft that makes much more sense than Shuttle.
At this very moment there's currently 6 satellites around the moon, each one communicating back to earth with more bandwidth than Apollo ever had. Over the course of 30 years there were 135 space shuttles launches, whereas SpaceX will launch approximately that many Falcon 9s with the same payload to space in 2024 alone.
Part of a well functioning economy is to divert resources from unproductive activities. Maintaining technologies that don't support real demand is unproductive.
It's sad when a technology that no longer "works" is abandoned, just like it's sad when (spoiler) Old Yeller has to be put down. That doesn't mean it's wrong.
It's good we lost the shuttle. It was hot garbage.
> now struggling just to get a small copy reaching the ISS.
I think you need to take funding levels into account.
The Shuttle cost $1.5B per launch (fully amortized). None of the commercial crew/cargo vehicles are anywhere close to that price. And the commercial crew vehicles are more capable of doing their job.
That's on top of having almost no endurance, having a pathetic payload mass fraction, needing humans to pilot it (meaning that it's much more difficult to improve the vehicle), and being an inherently unsafe design.
Okay ngl after the comment was made I looked at the image again and they kinda have a point but not really for the reasons they stated.
The things that do it are (partially) the color scheme/pattern and (mainly) the smoothed "windshield" form which kinda looks like the nubby fatty bit on an orca's head.
Fair. To be honest the space shuttle out of all animals it looks the most alike to an orca. So it seems a thing can look similar both to an orca and a space ship.
There's only so many basic shapes that actually work, this isn't like sci-fi where we can make interesting swooshy bits that look cool and have it still function.
So we've got capsules for no-glide landings, and things that look like a plane for use-cases that do want to glide during landing.
We're not going to get something that looks like an Eagle from Space: 1999 unless someone figures out a form of propulsion that's not dependent on the rocket equation or aerodynamics, such as pushing directly against the Earth's magnetic field or something.
Of course it is, in part. The article repeatedly mentions SpaceX, because they're the primary competitor for resupply missions. As such Dream Chaser has to be judged against that competition. Discussing SpaceX as it relates to competing with Dream Chaser, makes perfect sense given the context.
It's not explicitly clear (in english) from your links, but there is true design lineage from BOR to Dreamchaser. The HL-20 mold line was derived from spy plane imagery of BOR-4, and HL-20 was then the design basis for Dreamchaser.
There's a long chain of influences across the border in winged spacecraft development. Dyna-Soar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-20_Dyna-Soar) project in USA pushed works on Spiral' project in USSR, and BORs are a part of that. It arguably provides a link from HL-10 via USSR projects to HL-20, among other things.
Well, there already are other, operational space planes besides the X-37B. Namely the Shenlong[1] (3 success full missions) and the CSSHQ[2], the later being currently in orbit (3rd mission, launched in December 2023).
But we don't know that much about those either, as they are kept in just as much secrecy as the X-37B.
This would be a perfect Starship payload. I don't buy that human beings will ever reenter earth's atmosphere in Starship and land propulsively. There is simply too much safety advantage in an aerodynamically landable aircraft or parachute capsule to do it any other way.
You cannot compare the suborbital booster return to an oribital reentry, they are two completely different things. No SpaceX vehicle but Crew Dragon (a capsule) has ever returned astronauts from space, and I suspect it will be the only solution for a long time to come.
Mostly agree. Winged design can be much gentler for passing the atmosphere on the way back comparing to capsules and can probably even get passively to landing speed, the drawback being the requirements of the landing strip. They are also better to control, both with choosing the place to land and even with ability of having atmospheric engines, which would get them close to aircrafts in handling landing.
