The New 'Dream Chaser' Spacecraft Prepares to Visit the ISS
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
It is preparing for its first actual flight, since so far the closest it’s gotten to an actual flight is being dropped from a helicopter from about 3700 meters. It crash-landed when one of its landing wheels failed to deploy correctly.
I love the idea of private aerospace, but we need to be realistic about the complexity and difficulty of trans-atmospheric / gravitationally dominated ballistic flight as an endeavour.
This spacecraft may very well become a safe, economical option for short haul cargo and crew missions to and from earth to orbit… but let’s not breathlessly declare that it’s preparing to visit the ISS when we haven’t even burned any of them up yet testing the reentry capability of this adorable cessna-sized space minivan.
It’s not a good look for companies in the aerospace segment to wildly overstate their operational capabilities, and if that’s what is needed to attract investment, maybe we should figure out a better way.
Visiting the ISS does not involve the reentry capability, and being a test flight, on the journey back, they won't be attempting to bring down any cargo they can't afford to lose. They're saying it's preparing to visit the ISS because that literally is the objective of the first test flight. Maybe they've pulled a Boeing and it has too many issues to make it there, but the only way to find out is to actually launch it and attempt to head there and back.
As for carrying crew, that's still far away, they don't have a commercial crew contract from NASA, and are instead working with Blue Origin to provide transportation to their commercial space station. Given Blue's rate of getting things done so far, this is probably going to materialize well into the 2030s, if it materializes at all.
Hard disagree. It definitely looks like a space craft.
It looks like a chibi version of the shuttle.
Same with Concorde :/
It's sad when a technology that no longer "works" is abandoned, just like it's sad when (spoiler) Old Yeller has to be put down. That doesn't mean it's wrong.
Concorde was very loud and very fuel inefficient in an industry where efficiency is king, the modern struggle is not in achieving supersonic flight, but in doing it efficiently and quietly.
Similarly, the space shuttle was iconic, but more recent safety analyses have shown that it was a miracle only 2 launches resulted in total loss of crew, as initially it had a 1 in 9 chance of failure, later missions getting to 1 in 90. In comparison, all current human rated vehicles have to do better than 1 in 270. The Shuttle was also horrendously expensive, reusable in name only, and was limited heavily by requirements for it to be able to do certain things that it never actually ended up doing. Dreamchaser is supposed to be commercially viable, it can't burn billions per launch.
Similarly, with going to the Moon. We want to do more than just an Apollo style moonshot and establish a sustainable long term presence there (well, NASA wants to do more than that, Congress seems to just want to give money to Boeing), so now we have to make giant, spacious sci-fi-esque landers/bases that refuel in orbit before heading off.
Interesting. I didn't know that it improved so much during the project lifetime. Was it due to a few single changes or a bunch of tiny improvements moving the needle only in aggregate by that much?
A purely technical discussion on the problems that could down a Shuttle ignores the meta problem of poor risk analysis by the Shuttle managers. Basically they normalised deviance[0], in effect deciding that a technical problem wasn't an issue because they got away with it previously. This intrinsic weakness did not go away after the Challenger loss (hence Columbia [1]). Arguably, the only reason there wasn't another fatal loss was that the programme was grounded before after another accident could occur.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...
We're seeing plenty of normalization of deviance with SLS and Orion though. There were the issues with various backup systems and IIRC no life support in Artemis 1, with issues with the heat shield only recently being made public, yet Artemis 2 is intended to carry a crew. So I would not be surprised if Congress only finally gives up on that waste when they cause another crew to be killed and can blame NASA instead of themselves.
Shuttle was a political artifact and the reason behind the downturn (or at least one of the factors), not a victim of it. DC is a niche spacecraft that makes much more sense than Shuttle.
It's good we lost the shuttle. It was hot garbage.
> now struggling just to get a small copy reaching the ISS.
I think you need to take funding levels into account.
The Shuttle cost $1.5B per launch (fully amortized). None of the commercial crew/cargo vehicles are anywhere close to that price. And the commercial crew vehicles are more capable of doing their job.
That's on top of having almost no endurance, having a pathetic payload mass fraction, needing humans to pilot it (meaning that it's much more difficult to improve the vehicle), and being an inherently unsafe design.
The things that do it are (partially) the color scheme/pattern and (mainly) the smoothed "windshield" form which kinda looks like the nubby fatty bit on an orca's head.
I was dumbfounded. We’ve had this design for 50 years! What has taken so long?
There's only so many basic shapes that actually work, this isn't like sci-fi where we can make interesting swooshy bits that look cool and have it still function.
So we've got capsules for no-glide landings, and things that look like a plane for use-cases that do want to glide during landing.
We're not going to get something that looks like an Eagle from Space: 1999 unless someone figures out a form of propulsion that's not dependent on the rocket equation or aerodynamics, such as pushing directly against the Earth's magnetic field or something.
The idea/sketch is one thing but the actual engineering and funding is something else.
Meanwhile, the ULA Starliner launch that was supposed to happen early this week has been delayed until at least late May.[1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2024/05/18/1252311564/nasa-boeing-starli...
But we don't know that much about those either, as they are kept in just as much secrecy as the X-37B.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenlong_(spacecraft)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_reusable_experimental_...
https://universemagazine.com/en/space-debris-told-about-the-...
Agreed, but I expect Starship to be doing the same in a few years.