Dream Chaser rerouted after NASA rebuff

Private-sector space travel potential boon

Louisville – After missing out on a major multibillion-dollar NASA contract, Sierra Nevada Corp. is forging ahead with the Dream Chaser spacecraft program in a way that wouldn’t have been possible 20, or even 10, years ago.

SNC had always planned that its versatile space plane could be marketed for a variety of purposes and now, as the market for commercial space transport blossoms, that planning is paying off, in part because of the company’s other partnerships.

If a company has developed good private partners, says aerospace analyst Marco Caceres, it can survive a rejection from NASA.

SPONSORED CONTENT

Select your Republic Services residential cart now!

In preparation for Republic Services becoming the primary provider of residential recycling, yard trimmings, and trash, residents should now select the best cart size and service schedule for their household needs.

“You couldn’t do that (in the past),” said Caceres, senior analyst and director of space studies for Virginia-based Teal Group Corp. “But this is a whole new market in its early stages.”

NASA’s decision to award Boeing and SpaceX $6.8 billion for its next round of commercial crew funding no doubt stings for SNC, which bases its Space Systems division in Louisville. SNC is protesting the decision to the United States General Accounting Office, a process that should take about three months.

But SNC also isn’t waiting around. From providing turnkey space programs for countries that can’t afford their own to ferrying all kinds of cargo and small satellites to space for governments, academic institutions and companies, SNC is pursuing ways to keep Dream Chaser in the mix among the next generation of spacecraft.

And because Dream Chaser is a composite structure, once the first one is built and the mold established, subsequent vehicles become cheaper to build.

“The cost of getting the vehicles built is what we’re working on now,” Mark Sirangelo, head of SNC’s Space Systems, said. “Once they’re built, the mission opportunities seem to be there.”

If upheld, NASA’s recent decision means a greater chunk of the continued development cost of Dream Chaser – slated for its first unmanned flight into low-Earth Orbit in late 2016 – will have to come from SNC or private investors. But the company’s previous commercial crew contract with NASA runs through next year, with options to extend the relationship into 2017.

Getting beaten out in the commercial crew competition by Boeing and SpaceX also doesn’t necessarily mean the end for SNC with NASA. The United States’ space agency at the end of September announced a new round of cargo resupply contracts for the International Space Station. Sirangelo said those contracts, likely to be spread out among multiple companies, could be worth up to $14 billion in all.

SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, which have current cargo resupply deals with NASA, will no doubt be in the running for those. But the European and Japanese space agencies’ contracts to carry cargo for NASA will expire. And Dream Chaser, Sirangelo said, is uniquely suited to carry cargo.

For delicate scientific research and experiments that need to be brought back to Earth, for instance, Dream Chaser has the advantage of landing on a runway within six to 10 hours of leaving the ISS. It also returns to Earth at lower g-force than capsules such as SpaceX’s Dragon, which must make a splash-down landing in the ocean.

“If you have sensitive experiments, you want it to be taken care of,” Sirangelo said. “We think a portion of this cargo contract is something we can do very well.”

Landing part of the next cargo contract, Casares said, could be Dream Chaser’s “salvation in the short term.” It would keep a steady flow of funding coming from NASA, and would also keep the relationship with the space agency developing. Casares believes a successful protest to the GAO is unlikely but keeping the relationship with NASA alive through the cargo contract could keep SNC on NASA’s radar for future crew missions.

The Obama administration spurred much of the current commercialization of space by initiating the shift toward private companies ferrying crew and cargo for NASA rather than the agency developing its own vehicles. The thinking is that private companies could  innovate faster and less expensively than the government. But in that regard, Casares said it also benefits the government to spread its contracts around to provide contingencies if one company fails.

“If they stick around, there could be opportunities,” Casares said, for SNC to take NASA astronauts to space. “If something goes wrong with these other programs, they could be in a position to take advantage.”

Casares said SNC had a couple of disadvantages in the Commercial Crew competition. While the reusable nature of Dream Chaser makes it attractive once it is proven, SpaceX has already proven that it can dock safely with the ISS, and Boeing is a longtime stalwart of the aerospace industry.

That Dream Chaser did not have its own launch rocket, as SpaceX and Boeing do, may have been a disadvantage as well, Casares said. But that too is changing.

One of SNC’s recently announced partnerships could differentiate it in the rocket arena. SNC has designed a 75-percent scale version of Dream Chaser that could launch from Alabama-based Stratolaunch Systems’ air launch system. The system is essentially a large airplane that would carry Dream Chaser to a few miles above the Earth where Dream Chaser would launch.

Such a launch strategy would increase safety and cost savings by drastically reducing the amount of rocket fuel needed to leave the Earth.

That could make Dream Chaser more attractive for SNC’s other new initiative, Global Project. That project would provide an avenue for countries like Brazil or South Korea to send their own astronauts and science into space without incurring the cost of developing their own infrastructure to do so.

Because the ISS has limited space, many countries who want to conduct research in space can’t get on it. Dream Chaser, though, doesn’t have to dock with the ISS and can act as its own independent laboratory in orbit.

SNC isn’t releasing prices on what it might charge other countries – or academic institutions if they wanted them – for such rides. But Sirangelo said the program could be operational in a couple of years.

As a new space vehicle, Casares said the big thing for Dream Chaser is to find whatever market it can that will help it establish a frequent and safe rhythm of launches.

“If Sierra Nevada can launch and land safely dozens of times over the next few years, NASA will take notice,” he said.

The success of Dream Chaser, whether it comes via the Global Project or NASA or a combination of both, is important to Colorado’s economy. SNC, headquartered in Nevada, is a $2 billion per year company. It doesn’t disclose the revenue of Space Systems separately, but SNC employs 1,100 people between its two locations in Centennial and Louisville. Three-hundred of those are in Louisville, and that’s after 90 were laid off in the wake of NASA’s Commercial Crew decision.

While Lockheed Martin will build the composite structure for Dream Chaser out of state, design, assembly and systems testing will all be done in Colorado.

In addition to Dream Chaser, SNC launched six satellites for a company called ORBCOM over the summer and is due to launch 11 more by this time next year. SNC has also had a hand in things like the Mars rovers and the New Horizons mission that will do a fly-by of Pluto next summer. Equipment the company has helped build has been sent to seven different planets.

But Dream Chaser – nearly a decade in development since Space Systems’ days as a separate publicly traded company named SpaceDev – is certainly SNC’s most high-profile space project.

With a design that harkens back to NASA’s retired space shuttles, Dream Chaser has a chance to not only become the first privately built reusable spacecraft capable of carrying people into orbit but also of carrying on the shuttle’s legacy.

“We feel like we’re picking up their torch and moving it on,” Sirangelo said.

Joshua Lindenstein can be reached at 303-630-1943, 970-416-7343 or jlindenstein@bizwestmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @joshlindenstein.