Dream Chaser is once again awaiting its first space flight.
Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spaceplane will not launch as planned this summer aboard United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) new Vulcan Centaur rocket. That means ULA plans to move forward with two critical national security preparedness launches, scheduled to be completed by late 2024, to meet the needs of the U.S. Space Force.
ULA plans to focus its second-ever launch on Vulcan Centaur, a military certification flight called Cert-2, no sooner than September. Cert-2 will fly an inert payload, as well as experiments and demonstrations, CEO Tory Bruno announced today (June 26). A third preliminary launch for the US Space Force will then take place by the end of 2024.
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As for Dream Chaser, “We’re working with Sierra Space to get Dream Chaser back on the list when they’re ready to go,” Bruno told reporters in a conference call. “We waited as long as we could on Dream Chaser,” he added, “because we really wanted to fly it.”
A Sierra Space representative told Space.com that they could still be ready to fly Dream Chaser by the end of the year. “We continue to make excellent progress with Dream Chaser and the spaceplane is on track to fly in late 2024,” a representative told Space.com by email.
“As the defense engineering headquarters, we understand how important ULA’s Cert-2 mission is to our launch partner’s critical national security and schedule. We are working closely with ULA to identify the next available launch date,” the statement added.
ULA’s first Vulcan launch successfully delivered the private Astrobotic Technology Peregrine lunar lander to space, which never arrived at its destination due to an unrelated spacecraft anomaly. Bruno said that based on that work, the rocket is otherwise ready to continue the effort to launch lucrative missions for the Space Force.
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“It was a perfect fight and a bull’s-eye, smooth as silk,” Bruno said of the first mission, adding that it gave Space Force the confidence to move forward quickly.
ULA and Space Force are also confident they can pull off a second military pre-launch by late 2024 because the Peregrine launch “was so clean,” he said. While the methane tank underperformed very slightly, more insulation will be placed on the tank to prevent those issues from happening again on Cert-2.
CERT-2 will measure the boiling rate of Centaur’s fuel to see if the failure persists, and will send unknown experiments into space to “help us understand how we can extend the duration of the explosion.” [Centaur] “What is the best way to reach the top stage and what the practical limitations of that might be in the future,” Bruno said.
ULA will then have a busy 2025 if all goes according to plan. “We will fly 20 times when all the satellites appear,” he said, referring to launches with both Atlas V and Vulcan. ULA is spending “tens of millions” on the two national security preparations in 2024, in anticipation of this paying off in new contracts, Bruno noted.
It’s been a long road for Dream Chaser’s first trip to space. Based on NASA’s space shuttle and Soviet-era designs, it was an early participant in NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (albeit under earlier companies SpaceDev and then Sierra Nevada Corp.)
Dream Chaser was not selected for commercial crew after SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner were chosen in the final round in 2014; SNC later filed a protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which was overturned after the office found no problems with the evaluation.
But Sierra Space’s work with NASA wasn’t over yet. In 2016, the spacecraft was selected under a Commercial Resupply Services 2 (CRS-2) contract from NASA, which included at least six flights to the ISS. (SpaceX and Orbital ATK, now part of Northrop Grumman, also received funding for their Dragon and Cygnus vehicles, respectively.)
Development of Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser has continued, including ground testing and autonomous glide flights in Earth’s atmosphere. Earlier this year, engineers also conducted vibration and pressure tests at NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio.