Dream Chaser - NASA коммерческий контракт с SpaceDev

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https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/features/dreamchaser_arrives_at_armstrong.html
Jan. 27, 2017

Dream Chaser Spacecraft Arrives at NASA Armstrong

Sierra Nevada Corporation delivered its Dream Chaser spacecraft Wednesday to NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, located on Edwards Air Force Base. The spacecraft will undergo several months of testing at the center in preparation for its approach and landing flight on the base's 22L runway.

The test series is part of a developmental space act agreement SNC has with NASA's Commercial Crew Program. The upcoming test campaign will help SNC validate the aerodynamic properties, flight software and control system performance of the Dream Chaser.

The Dream Chaser is also being prepared to deliver cargo to the International Space Station under NASA's Commercial Resupply Services 2 (CRS2) contract beginning in 2019. The data that SNC gathers from this test campaign will help influence and inform the final design of the cargo Dream Chaser, which will fly at least six cargo delivery missions to and from the space station by 2024.
Top Image: SNC delivers Dream Chaser to NASA Armstrong posing it with the HL-10 lifting body flown the 1960s (NASA Photo / Ken Ulbrich).

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:|   Толи занесло человека

 http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-county-news/ci_30738897/dream-chaser-spacecraft-joins-boulder-county-morning-commuter

Dream Chaser spacecraft joins Boulder County morning commuter traffic
By Charlie Brennan
Staff Writer

01/20/2017

Morning commuters in Boulder and Longmont on Friday found themselves sharing the road with an oversized vehicle that appeared more appropriate for the airspace above them.
A spokeswoman for Louisville's Sierra Nevada Corporation confirmed that its Dream Chaser spacecraft has been "wrapped up" and was being transported to an undisclosed location for testing.
Motorists might well have seen the spacecraft, on a truck with police escort, on Arapahoe Road, Foothills Parkway or the Diagonal Highway before it headed east on Colo. 119 toward Interstate 25.
Sierra Nevada communications manager Kimberly Schwandt said Friday that she had no more details to provide about its destination.
Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser spacecraft is a multi-mission, commercial, lifting-body vehicle capable of transporting services to low-Earth orbit destinations, including the International Space Station. Officials have said that payloads will be selected in early 2018 to allow time for development and integration into the Dream Chaser for expected launch in 2021.

[Salo]

Chris B - NSF ‏@NASASpaceflight  1 мин.1 минуту назад
ARTICLE: Sierra Nevada prepares for spring landing test of Dream Chaser - https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2017/01/sierra-nevada-spring-landing-dream-chaser/ ... - by @CwG_NSF
   
 
   
 

[Salo]

О советских предшественниках:


В ролике есть и Лукашевич.

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WSJ что-то стали много писать про Трампа и космос.

 https://www.wsj.com/articles/officials-mull-proposal-for-manned-mission-to-refurbish-hubble-telescope-1486927198

Officials Mull Proposal for Manned Mission to Refurbish Hubble Telescope

Industry initiative could meet Trump goals of swift, dramatic space effort.
....
Years ago NASA officials considered, on their own, a similar mission using basically the same spacecraft to link up with the 6-ton Hubble, circling the Earth roughly every 90 minutes at an altitude of more than 300 miles. But no formal program was developed or funded by Congress.

For Sierra Nevada, such a task would be a natural extension of its drive to find multiple uses for the Dream Chaser. It can be used "as an exploration vehicle, a free-flight science laboratory and a servicing vehicle" for in-orbit satellites and spacecraft, Mark Sirangelo, head of the company's space systems unit, told a conference in Washington last week. The spacecraft, which isn't due for its inaugural unmanned launch until 2019, also is intended to be capable of landing on any conventional runway long enough to handle a Boeing Co. 737 jetliner.

Over the weekend, a company representative said a Hubble mission would allow valuable research to continue and "inspire new generations of explorers and researchers." He said that Dream Chaser was "designed from the beginning to be a multi-mission orbital transportation system" eventually targeting "servicing, repair and assembly of technology" during space flight. "They have always been part of our vision," he said, and Sierra Nevada "continues to actively evaluate a future on-orbit servicing variant."

In little more than a decade, Sierra Nevada has grown from a handful of employees to a company with a workforce of 2,000 and operations in 19 states. It manufactures small satellites, electronic systems, an array of spacecraft components and does considerable business with NASA.

Replacing navigation hardware, aging sensors and other geriatric parts on Hubble would require relatively few additional dollars, because the telescope has a modular design and Dream Chaser's cargo variant already is undergoing flight tests. The vehicle would need additional life-support systems as well as a launch-abort system designed to protect the crew in the event of an explosion or serious problem on the pad or during early phases of its ascent.

Sierra Nevada previously designed both systems in detail, though additional resources would be needed to conduct further tests and build flight hardware.
..

Пилотируемую версию никто и не заказал. Пока контракт только на разработку.

Полную статью можно прочесть переходя с https://twitter.com/Ally_Abrams/status/831171520290492416

А ребята даже через кино продвигают

 http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=50384
Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dream Chaser® Spacecraft Featured in Movie "The Space Between Us"

[Alex_II]

pnetmon пишет:
А ребята даже через кино продвигают

Ребята судя по всему очень хотят пилотируемую версию, вот и ищут, кто бы заплатил... Не удивлюсь даже, если у них на нее документация готова, насколько это возможно без финансирования...

[Paleopulo]

Alex_II пишет: 
Ребята судя по всему очень хотят пилотируемую версию, вот и ищут, кто бы заплатил... Не удивлюсь даже, если у них на нее документация готова, насколько это возможно без финансирования...

Отработка грузового варианта за деньги НАСА - отличный старт для перевода в пилотируемый вариант. Они, правда, пишут, что выкинули все СОЖ  и системы контроля среды, как и САС. Но их недолго и на место вернуть, если планер будет уже полностью отлажен. Особенно с идей "взлет после завтрака, посадка к обеду", то есть на весть полет (со стыковкой с МКС) - от 6 до 10 часов. А это уже заявка на корабль для экстренной эвакуации с МКС. При чем перегрузку при посадке обещают не более 1,6g.
Очень интересный кораблик может получиться.

[Alex_II]

Paleopulo пишет:
Особенно с идей "взлет после завтрака, посадка к обеду"

Для такого надо иметь постоянно готовую к пуску ракету... Это вообще возможно для Атласа?

[Paleopulo]

Alex_II пишет:
Для такого надо иметь постоянно готовую к пуску ракету... Это вообще возможно для Атласа?

Речь у них шла о возможностях корабля, а не РН. Если решат использовать DC в качестве корабля-спасателя, то, возможно, будет держать в МИКе постоянно один Атлас (по ротации). А вот какое время занимает его предстартовая подготовка - я не знаю.

P.S. Только что прочитал: The Wall Street Journal reports that Sierra Nevada Corporation has put forth a proposal to send a crewed Dream Chaser to service the aging Hubble Space Telescope. То есть они очень хотят пилотируемый вариант. В любом виде.

[triage]

Paleopulo пишет:
P.S. Только что прочитал: The Wall Street Journal reports that Sierra Nevada Corporation has put forth a proposal to send a crewed Dream Chaser to service the aging Hubble Space Telescope. То есть они очень хотят пилотируемый вариант. В любом виде.

А что производителю не хотеть получить прибыль? Указанная статья приведена кусками чуть выше.

Все таки шаттл разрабатывался для длительных самостоятельных полетов, с ВКД экипажа и взаимодействия с космическими аппаратами. У DrCh манипулятора нет, сам намного меньше, больше разрабатывался как такси по доставке экипажа на/с станцию. Интересно как ВКД прорабатывали - работа со скафандрами, шлюз для выхода....
Хотя некоторые спрашивают, а можно ли использовать Дракон...

[Paleopulo]

pnetmon пишет:
А что производителю не хотеть получить прибыль? Указанная статья приведена кусками чуть выше.
 
Интересно как ВКД прорабатывали - работа со скафандрами, шлюз для выхода....
 Хотя некоторые спрашивают, а можно ли использовать Дракон...

Ну, иной производитель не хочет рисковать. Синица в руках и журавль в небе.
Я не думаю, что уже детально кем-то прорабатывался сценарий ВКД при ремонте Хаббла. Это пока скорее идея просто, предложения для обсуждения.
На форуме тут у нас и использование Союза как-то обсуждали.

[tnt22]

pnetmon пишет:
Dream Chaser Spacecraft Arrives at NASA Armstrong

Видео (0:57)

[ken_park]

ken_park пишет:

Виктор Левашов пишет:

ken_park пишет:
Вопрос: на слайде №1 сабж стыкуется к IDA - значит система стыковки есть, на №4 сабж стыкуется при помощи "канадоруки" - значит системы автоматической стыковки нет; так будет или не будет?

а зачем? если рука есть.
безопаснее, мне думается, рукой.

на сколько мне видится, стыковка манипулятором для корабля с людьми не допустима с точки зрения безопасности

и вот еще:

а я што говорил

[ken_park]

чавойто?

[tnt22]

https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/03/06/sierra-nevada-to-resume-dream-chaser-flight-tests/

Sierra Nevada to resume Dream Chaser flight tests
 March 6, 2017 Stephen Clark

Спойлер

Artist's concept of a Dream Chaser spacecraft arriving at the International Space Station. Credit: Sierra Nevada

[свернуть]

An atmospheric test model of Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser space plane is being readied for tow and landing tests at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California this spring.

The partially-assembled test craft arrived at the California test site, located on Edwards Air Force Base, on Jan. 25. Technicians are adding the ship's V-shaped tail fins and other equipment before kicking off ground and flight tests in the coming months, according to Mark Sirangelo, corporate vice president of Sierra Nevada's space systems division.

Спойлер

"We'll do a series of ground tests," Sirangelo said in a recent interview. "That will include towing the vehicle down the runway, and that allows us to see how it stops and how it moves, but it also allows us to test all the sensors on the vehicle because we can get it up to a high enough speed where that will happen."

The Dream Chaser spacecraft, originally envisioned to fly with astronaut crews, will now fly on space missions with cargo deliveries heading for the International Space Station. That change means the spaceship will return to Earth on autopilot, using navigation aids to descend to a runway, deploy its landing gear and touch down like NASA's space shuttles.

After the ground tests, Sirangelo said the Dream Chaser test article will perform "captive carry" tests suspended under a helicopter, using the exercises to verify the movements of the craft's aerosurfaces and navigation instrumentation.

"When that's done, we'll move into a series of flight tests, where it will be dropped for approach and landing like the shuttle Enterprise," Sirangelo said, referring to the vehicle NASA used for landing demonstrations in the 1970s before the first full-up space shuttle mission.

The Dream Chaser will be dropped from heavy-duty carrier helicopter for an autonomous landing at Runway 22L at Edwards Air Force Base.

The test campaign in California's Mojave Desert comes three-and-a-half years after Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser last flew on its own. A drop test in October 2013 ended with a crash landing after the ship's left landing gear failed to deploy.

Sierra Nevada says the 2013 flight was successful until that point, and Dream Chaser's autopilot landing system steered the craft toward the runway for a touchdown on the centerline.

Engineers blamed the mishap on a landing gear borrowed from a U.S. Air Force F-5E jet. Future Dream Chaser cargo missions to the space station will fly with a different landing gear, and the spaceship preparing for tests this spring in California features a gear more advanced then the suspect system at fault in 2013.

 
The Dream Chaser test craft arrived at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in late January. Credit: NASA/Ken Ulbrich
 
"We had borrowed that gear for that test, and that was one of the decision we made that didn't work out, obviously," Sirangelo said. "It wasn't the orbital flight design. It's a completely different design system now, so it's very different from what we had before. It's not quite the full orbital design, but it's on that path."

After the crash landing in 2013, Sierra Nevada returned the damaged test craft to the company's facility in Louisville, Colorado, for repairs. While the vehicle set for landing tests in the coming months is the same one that flew in 2013, Sirangelo said it is "substantially upgraded."

"It's much more close to the (configuration) of the orbital vehicle now, with flight software," Sirangelo told Spaceflight Now. "It's fully autonomous, so it will use flight software that we'll go to orbit with. All the control surfaces, and all the data gathering is all electronic.

"The computer systems are now the orbital version of the computer systems that we will manage with, so it's structurally similar, but virtually the whole inside of the vehicle has been updated and changed."

In 2013, Sierra Nevada was competing with Boeing and SpaceX for lucrative contracts with NASA to carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The space agency awarded the crew transportation deals to the other two companies in 2014, leaving Dream Chaser's future uncertain.

But Sierra Nevada found other business for the lifting body space plane, primarily in the space station's cargo resupply program. NASA announced in January 2016 that Sierra Nevada, SpaceX and Orbital ATK will be responsible for hauling up most of the space station's U.S. cargo and experiments from 2019 through 2024, the station's current planned retirement date.

SpaceX and Orbital ATK are the incumbent commercial cargo transportation contractors, and Sierra Nevada will join them in the follow-on contract.

Sierra Nevada also has agreements with the European Space Agency to study the use of Dream Chaser to provide access to space for European research experiments after the end of the space station program in the 2020s. The United Nations agreed last year to purchase a standalone unpiloted Dream Chaser mission to Earth orbit in 2021 to host research payloads from developing nations.

Sirangelo said the long gap between Dream Chaser flight tests was not only driven by technical concerns — like the upgrade and repair of the test craft — but by closing the business case for the program.

"We had to go and win a contract," Sirangelo said. "We needed a path to really make this all worthwhile to take this next step. Once we won the contract a year ago, we were able to accelerate the program and get back into flight tests."

The feeling among Sierra Nevada's team is different this time, he said.

"Not only are we back in flight tests, but now it's different in that we know that we have a contract," Sirangelo said. "We have flights coming up. We've got decades of flights in front of us, so it's a different feeling."

Under the structure of the cargo resupply contract, each partner must pass several programmatic, safety and integration milestones before flying missions. Sierra Nevada has passed two of those milestones so far, Sirangelo said, and a preliminary design review for the full Dream Chaser system is coming up soon.

NASA has not ordered resupply missions from any of the three providers under the new cargo contract — called Commercial Resupply Services-2 — but Sirangelo said the company hopes to get a firm order and a target launch date from the space agency this year. Each of the three CRS-2 contract winners is guaranteed at least six missions.

On space station resupply runs, the Dream Chaser will take off from Florida on top of United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rockets and return to runway landings at one of several potential sites, such as the Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center, for unpacking, refurbishment and reuse.

The Dream Chaser is about one-quarter the size of a space shuttle orbiter, allowing it to land on shorter runways.

It is capable of delivering more than 12,000 pounds (5,500 kilograms) of equipment to the space station inside its pressurized compartment and on an external aft-mounted payload carrier. At the end of each flight, the two parts will detach, with the Dream Chaser space plane returning to Earth with research specimens and other gear, and the disposable cargo module burning up in the atmosphere to incinerate trash.

The fully-loaded spacecraft will weigh around 20 tons and will likely require the lift capacity of ULA's most powerful Atlas 5 rocket configuration — the "551" with five strap-on solid rocket boosters and a 5-meter (17-foot) payload fairing, according to Sirangelo.

The first space-rated Dream Chaser is "well under design and development" and on schedule, he said.

"We've now built the full pressure shell and tested it, and now we're building the orbital shell — we call it the external structure — the structure of the vehicle, and all the flight software," Sirangelo said. "A lot of the work has been on the software side because it is a fully autonomous vehicle now, so it's well on the way to being ready on time."

Lockheed Martin built the Dream Chaser's composite structure, and Sierra Nevada will locate the spaceship's launch site processing facility alongside Lockheed Martin's Orion production line inside the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

[свернуть]

[triage]

Непонятно откуда взяли

Sierra Nevada also has agreements with the European Space Agency to study the use of Dream Chaser to provide access to space for European research experiments after the end of the space station program in the 2020s

именно после.

[triage]

Apollo13 пишет:
 https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/5yjpvo/spaceflight_manifest_shows_7_dedicated_f9/

Спойлер

Learned a lot today from a talk from a Spaceflight mission manager at the IEEE Aerospace Conference. Apologies for the potato quality photo - SpaceX details transcribed below:
 SSO-A - Q4 2017, 575 x 575 km SSO, 10:30 plane SSO-B - Q4 2018, 500 x 500 km SSO, 10:30 plane GTO-1 - H2 2018, 200 x 35786 km, 27.5 deg inclination GTO-2 - H2 2018, 200 x 60000 km, 27.5 deg inclination SSO-C - H2 2019, 500 x 500 km SSO, 10:30 plane GTO-C - H1 2020, 200 x 35786 km, 27.5 deg inclination (and away went consistent mission naming) SSO-D - H2 2020, 500 x 500 km SSO, 10:30 plane
 It's unclear if missions beyond SSO-A are officially under contract, though it's not unreasonable to believe that at least some of them are, given that 2-3 years is not a whole lot of lead time in rocket land. These missions are all "dedicated rideshare," meaning Spaceflight has bought (or intends to buy) the entire F9, and then sell off payload space to smaller spacecraft (SSO-A was quoted as carrying 90 satellites).
In other manifest shuffling news, SpaceIL is not flying their lunar lander with SpaceX at the end of this year as planned, due to delays on their end - they're targeting a launch in 2019 (unclear if F9 or someone else). Speaking of delays, Spaceflight manager said that he expects Formosat-5 (an F9 launch which, until recently, was to carry a ring of secondary payloads for Spaceflight on a Sherpa carrier) to launch sometime in 2017, but that Spaceflight pulled out because they were fed up with delays and had some customers who'd been delayed over 2 years, and were concerned that Formosat-5 has a low priority in the launch queue and could slip to 2018. The Sherpa payloads were remanifested to a mixture of Indian PSLV launches (some as soon as this summer) and the nominally-in-December SSO-A.

[свернуть]

Final bonus new info from Sierra Nevada Corp, who had a speaker to talk about the Dream Chaser. In its cargo configuration (which won a CRS2 contract, and will be serving cargo missions alongside SpaceX starting around 2019), the Dream Chaser is launched inside of a fairing towing an extra pressurized cargo capsule. The capsule makes the entire Dream Chaser assembly too long to fit in a SpaceX fairing, but its wings fold, allowing it to fit cross-sectionally (indeed, she said a crew Dream Chaser could probably fly on an F9, as the crew version doesn't use a fairing or tow an extra cargo pod). The speaker said that Sierra Nevada talked to SpaceX about engineering a longer fairing (and was naturally met with "sure, if you pay for it"    but expects to look at it more seriously in a couple of years.

[PIN]

pnetmon пишет:
European research experiments after the end of the space station program in the 2020s

Это если Space Rider закроется как программа. Если нет - шансы ниже.

[Apollo13]

А одноразовый багажник Дрим Чейзера случайно не европейский будет? Где-то проскакивало, что в Дрим Чейзере довольно приличное участие Европы должно быть.

[PIN]

Apollo13 пишет:
Где-то проскакивало, что в Дрим Чейзере довольно приличное участие Европы должно быть.

Насколько знаю, кроме проектирования и производства 1 экземпляра стыковочного узла - ничего. Это 33 миллиона Евро, что есть капля в бюджете ЕКА.
Если под "участием" вы подразумеваете приобретение за деньги SNC чего-то у производителей в Европе, то вполне возможно, это тоже наличествует, я не слежу.