Mon, Dec 18, 2023
Spacecraft Getting Ready for Operations in 2024
Sierra Space's "Dream Chaser", the "world's only commercial spaceplane", has begun its final testing phase ahead of planned operations in 2024.
Dream Chaser nestled into the NASA test facility to join Sierra's cargo module, the Shooting Star. Both will be unified in a launch stack for testing in the coming weeks, evaluating their resilience to forces, vibration, and wear. NASA's Mechanical Vibration Facility will provide "rigorous" testing to emulate the "extreme conditions of launch vibrations" using a large shaker table.
As they eye their eventual operations, Sierra Space took a moment to brag about the Dream Chaser's improvements over previous ships. It will use commercial runways for landing, precluding the need to land in the sea. It will be more reusable than previous crew capsules, completing at least 15 missions in its regular life span. Low-G landings will better protect crew and cargo, and high-capacity up-and-down-mass payloads will provide much better cargo throughput over legacy designs.
“At Sierra Space, we are ushering in the next industrial revolution with a business and technology platform that provides our customers with a complete turn-key solution offering space as a service,” said Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice. “Our platform includes Dream Chaser, a revolutionary, highly reusable commercial spaceplane with global runway access, and the first business-ready commercial space station, leveraging the most advanced expandable structural architecture that will exponentially decrease the cost of product development and manufacturing in space.”
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