Dream Chaser, Artemis from NASA and more

Sierra Nevada Corporation is best known as a private aerospace and national security contractor. However, the company is investing heavily in its space systems division, especially with NASA and other companies building infrastructures in orbit.

“Our vision for the future is a vibrant, near-earth orbit commercial economy,” said Steve Lindsey, SNC senior vice president of strategic space systems, to CNBC. “We want to be the logistics and crew provider in the future, so we’re really playing the long game.”

While SNC has been involved in hundreds of exploration missions and more to date, Dream Chaser is the crown jewel of its space portfolio: a reusable spaceship that resembles a miniaturized NASA space shuttle in appearance and is intended to be launched on a traditional rocket and land on a runway like an airplane.

“We see the Dream Chaser as something that will eventually provide transportation, logistics and crewing for everyone in low-earth orbit,” said Lindsey.

In the coming year, SNC will focus on launching Dream Chaser for the first time. The vehicle that SNC is currently building is optimized for the transport of cargo, not the crew, and is under contract to fly supplies and research to the International Space Station for NASA.

Lindsey has been working on SNC’s Dream Chaser program for nearly a decade. While SNC had received more than $ 360 million in development contracts from NASA as part of the competitive Commercial Crew program, in 2014 the agency chose SpaceX and Boeing for further contracts. Despite the setback in developing a Dream Chaser as a crew vehicle, SNC focused on focusing the spacecraft on winning contracts under NASA’s second generation commercial Resupply Services program.

But SNC is building Dream Chasers to go way beyond the upcoming cargo missions.

“We see it as the future vehicle that will fly for the next 30, 40 or more years,” said Lindsey.

The company announced earlier this year that the first Dream Chaser would be called “Tenacity”. Lindsey said this was reasonable given the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“2020 has been a bit of a difficult year for all of us, but we’re working on the challenges … and developing different ways to keep up,” said Lindsey.

SNC was able to keep production of the first Dream Chaser spacecraft on schedule, operating multiple shifts a day. SNC is building both Dream Chaser, which can carry 4,080 pounds of supplies, and the accompanying Shooting Star cargo, which can carry an additional 11,000 pounds of cargo. One of the most important assembly steps is installing the wings on the Dream Chaser, which Lindsey expects to be early next year.

As soon as the Dream Chaser and Shooting Star have been created, SNC switches to the acceptance test. Here, SNC will bend and push the boundaries of the spacecraft’s structure to reproduce the intense physical pressures of launch and re-entry through the atmosphere. Next, SNC will bring both spacecraft to Plum Brook Station, a facility at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio. There, the vehicle is placed in a thermal vacuum chamber and subjected to a test that simulates the environment in space, including vibration and acoustic tests.

From Plum Brook, Lindsey said SNC will send the two spacecraft to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where they will go through final testing and processing before launch.

SNC has proven “that the Dream Chaser structure is certified for at least 15 missions,” said Lindsey. This is key to the company’s high investment in the spaceship, as reuse helps reduce costs. In addition, Lindsey noted that SNC would also like to certify its thermal protection system for 15 missions. This part of the spacecraft is made up of approximately 2,000 tiles that protect the spacecraft upon re-entry into the atmosphere when temperatures can reach more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Lindsey, who has flown five space shuttle missions himself, found that the Dream Chaser tiles are “much harder than” those on previous NASA spacecraft. Dream Chaser’s environmental control system will then help keep the temperature at what Lindsey calls “shirt sleeves”, which is important for both sensitive cargo and people to fly.

Dream Chaser doesn’t have any toxic propellants on board either. While some starships use what are known as hypergolic propellants, which Lindsey said would have been easier, the company avoided doing this “because we want to land anywhere in the world where a 737 aircraft can handle the vehicle without special equipment.”

The crew version of Dream Chaser is designed for up to five astronauts. SNC aims to make Dream Chaser’s price competitive with others in the market. Lindsey said his company wanted to “be closer to what SpaceX is aiming for”. NASA expects SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule costs approximately $ 55 million per person.

“What is really interesting is that a lot of the prices really depend on the price of the rocket,” said Lindsey. “Our cost of running Dream Chaser is not that high, so we’re excited to see all of the things that happen [in the industry] – Every large launch company builds new missiles to be more competitively priced. That is one of the things that is required for the economy to flourish in Earth orbit, it is the drop in these rocket prices. “

Currently United Launch Alliance, the joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martinis the launch provider of Dream Chaser. SNC signs a six-mission contract with ULA to fly the upcoming Vulcan missile. The first mission is planned for next year.

“Our goal here is to get this vehicle up and running as quickly as possible, but we also have to do it safely,” said Lindsey.

SNC has yet to elaborate on when the launch day is scheduled, and Lindsey noted that the timing is “a negotiation between us and NASA”. But the agency’s leadership stopped at SNC’s Louisville, Colorado, facility last week, where they also visit Dream Chaser in production.

This dream chaser can be built for cargo, but 85% of its parts are the same as the crew variant – with the structure also certified for the crew.

“We never lost track of things [flying astronauts]”Said Lindsey.” Our intention is to join the crew at some point. “

SNC is working on part of the infrastructure so that people can live and work in space: an inflatable living space that the company has been developing for several years under a NASA contract. SNC’s habitat design is three stories, but since it’s inflatable it could be launched with a conventional rocket. Lindsey noted that habitat has a variety of uses, such as a station in orbit or a base on the lunar surface. The company’s latest tests have also shown that the inflatable structure is even stronger than expected.

“We just finished testing a third scale model and had to stop testing because we couldn’t break it,” said Lindsey.

Inflatable living spaces have been studied by other companies for the advantage of starting in a smaller form factor and then expanding to larger volume once in space. Bigelow Aerospace is known for developing inflatable habitats after the BEAM module was attached to the International Space Station in 2016. However, Bigelow Aerospace hadn’t launched any of its planned full-size habitats prior to the company Reportedly closed earlier this year.

Lindsey noted that SNC’s structure and methodology is different from Bigelow Aerospace’s, but the two companies had worked together – when SNC built the mechanism that connected BEAM to the ISS.

In addition to the inflatable habitat, Lindsey has an advanced development group at SNC that said “is studying and applying derivative dream chaser technologies in other areas”. This team put forward a proposal for an outpost using the Shooting Star cargo module – for which SNC received an order from the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit in July.

“Imagine a large, very powerful satellite with a tremendous amount of power that can be optionally manned or unmanned,” said Lindsey.

As the SNC Vice President put it simply, “We are heavily involved in pretty much everything NASA does in exploration.” With the US space agency largely focused on further exploration of the moon, SNC is part of three NASA efforts: the Human Landing Systems (HLS) program, the lunar gateway, and the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

The HLS program is the biggest short-term opportunity as NASA plans to invest heavily in at least one of the three teams fighting to build a lunar lander that can get astronauts to and from the lunar surface. SNC is part of the HLS team led by Dynetics – a space company owned by the defense company Leidos – what competes with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue origin. The three teams combined won $ 967 million earlier this year. After a ten-month design study period, even more lucrative awards are expected in February.

“We are also involved, believe it or not, in building a multi-unit lunar rover,” said Lindsey. “Although there hasn’t been a call for proposals … NASA is looking for an unpressurized rover that would actually carry people on the lunar surface – some sort of Apollo on steroids.”

Additionally, Lindsey noted that the Japanese space agency recently partnered with NASA to provide a pressurized moon rover – another proposal that SNC is involved in.

“We are currently working on some partnerships with these two big rovers,” said Lindsey. “We can’t really talk about team-mates very much, but … we’ll take this opportunity.”

Finally, SNC is also considering using its Shooting Star cargo module as a pressurized spacecraft designed to transport astronauts from orbit to the moon.

“We can step up with Dream Chaser, just put the crew in a free-flying cargo module and use it to transport people,” said Lindsey.

The Dream Chaser spaceship is at the heart of SNC’s vision for infrastructure in space. The company wants to be part of many areas that industry analysts expect to grow rapidly over the next decade.

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