Sunday, April 28, 2019

Dreamchaser

This is a space shuttle which looks like the former NASA Space Shuttle, except it's a lot smaller.  Unlike SpaceX's BFR/BFS/Starship/Super Heavy, it's designed purely to get to and from LEO.  Like the Shuttle, it will glide in to land at airport runways, whereas SpaceX's and Blue Origin's plans call for retro-propulsion (firing rockets to slow the booster or capsule for landing)

Initially, it'll just be for cargo, but later on, plans are that a crew version will be able to carry people (5, I think) to and from ISS.  NASA has approved its production, and has given Sierra Nevada Corporation, the company building DreamChaser (where did they get that name?) a contract for 6 missions to the ISS.

Competition is good.  It leads to lower costs and new ideas, especially where technology is developing rapidly.  The legacy space companies (ULA, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, ESA, Roscomos) are all expensive.  The newcomers (Sierra Nevada, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic) are all pursuing different pathways to getting us into space cheaply.   One thing they all have in common, though, is re-usability.  That is key to cheap space.  SNC says that launch vehicle costs with ULA, which doesn't do re-usable, are 80% of the cost of every mission they fly.  If they switch to SpaceX or Blue Origin, those costs will fall 10-fold.


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