Dream Chaser will once again host its first space flight.
Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser space plane will not launch this summer as planned aboard United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) new Vulcan Centaur rocket. That means ULA plans to move forward with two critical national security readiness launches that must be completed by the end of 2024 to satisfy the needs of the US Space Force.
ULA plans to focus its second-ever Vulcan Centaur launch, a military certification flight called Cert-2, no earlier than September. Cert-2 will fly with inert payloads as well as experiments and demonstrations, CEO Tory Bruno announced today (June 26). Then a third preparatory launch for the US Space Force will occur by the end of 2024.
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As for Dream Chaser: “We’re working with Sierra Space to put Dream Chaser back on the manifest when they’re ready to go,” Bruno told reporters on a conference call. “We waited as long as possible on the Dream Chaser,” he added, “because we really wanted to fly them.”
A Sierra Space representative told Space.com that they may still be ready to fly the Dream Chaser by the end of the year. “We continue to make excellent progress on Dream Chaser and the spacecraft is on track to fly by the end of 2024,” a representative told Space.com via email.
“As a defense technology premier, we understand how important ULA’s Cert-2 mission is to critical national security and our launch partner’s schedule. We are working closely with ULA to identify the date next release,” added the statement.
ULA’s first Vulcan launch successfully sent Astrobotic Technology’s private lunar lander Peregrine into space, which never reached its destination due to an unrelated spacecraft anomaly. Bruno said that based on this work, the rocket is otherwise ready to continue efforts to launch profitable missions for the Space Force.
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“It was a perfect fight and a bullseye, smooth as silk,” Bruno said of the first mission, adding that it gave Space Force confidence to move forward quickly.
ULA and Space Force are also confident they can squeeze in a second military training launch by the end of 2024, since Peregrine’s launch “was so clean,” he said. While the methane tank had very little underperformance, there will be more insulation in the tank to avoid those issues again in Cert-2.
Cert-2 will measure Centauri’s propellant depletion to see if the fault persists and will send undetected experiments into orbit to “help us figure out how to extend the duration of [Centaur] upper stage and what the practical limits for this might be in the future,” said Bruno.
ULA will then have a loaded 2025 if all goes according to plan. “We will fly 20 times if all the satellites appear,” he said, referring to the Atlas V and Vulcan launches. ULA is spending “in the high tens of millions” on two national security preparations launches in 2024 in anticipation of the new contracts paying off, Bruno noted.
It’s been a long road for Dream Chaser’s first trip into space. Based on NASA spacecraft and Soviet-era designs, it was an early participant in NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (albeit under the former 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 selected in the final round in 2014; SNC later filed a protest with the US Government Accountability Office, which was dismissed after the office found no problems with the assessment.
But Sierra Space’s work with NASA wasn’t over. In 2016, the spacecraft was selected under a Commercial Resupply Services 2 (CRS-2) contract by the NAS scheduling 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.