50 years to orbit: Dream Chaser’s crazy Cold War backstory

One clear, sunny day this past May, the residents of Broomfield, Colorado spotted what was, for most of them, an unidentified flying object.

Surrounded by excited, shouting workers in American blue jeans and orange coveralls, an Erickson Aircrane helicopter hoisted the UFO up off its perch of rectangular white styrofoam and carried it in circles around the local airstrip. The workers took notes and pictures, the local news took even more pictures, and the resulting images went viral. That day, the world met Dream Chaser, the small spacecraft that Sierra Nevada Corporation hopes will become NASA’s future ride to the International Space Station.

Dream Chaser recently completed its first milestone in the third round of NASA’s Commercial Crew development program, CCiCap, and it’s set to be dropped from a helicopter for first landing tests some time later this year. It’s the only spaceplane on NASA’s short list of CCiCap partners; the other two are Apollo-like capsules designed to plummet back to Earth. For those who love it, Dream Chaser inspires enthusiasm because it reminds them of a Space Shuttle, and because it can do things that a capsule can’t.

But while the craft itself is new, Dream Chaser’s history goes much further back than that spotting over Broomfield. The Dream Chaser is a Cold War product, replete with secret military programs, spy planes, rocket scientists, Russian trawlers, and Air Force test pilots working in the middle of the desert. Fifty years later, this descendant of a secret Soviet spaceplane might finally see its way into orbit.

Distant branches of a family tree

The American branches of the Dream Chaser family tree begin with Dale Reed, a man who loved anything that flew. Reed spent the 1960s doing experiments at what became known as NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center. The small research station was based at Edwards Air Force Base and located by Rogers Dry Lake, smack in the hot, parched middle of Southern California. As a fresh young aeronautical engineer in 1953, Reed by his own account “drove south from Idaho and west across the Nevada desert to the town of Mojave, California, where I made a sharp southeastern turn into the middle of nowhere.”

Two years before, NASA Ames researchers had made an important discovery: a blunt-nosed airplane didn’t get hot the way a pointy-nosed one did when it reached supersonic speeds, because a pressure wave held the hot air away from the nose. A blunt-nosed spacecraft was therefore more likely to survive atmospheric re-entry.

It was a breakthrough, but an unsatisfying one for an airplane lover, because the blunt capsule shapes Ames researchers began testing didn’t fly very well. They fell through the atmosphere and decelerated at about eight times Earth’s gravity, a crushing ride for whoever would be inside. Dale Reed decided that a flying spacecraft was a better option, one with the ability to reenter gently and fly to a specific destination.

Reed didn’t favor wings, however. Wings are a problem for re-entry vehicles; they burn up easily and they must be strong enough to withstand the force of reentering the atmosphere at over 20,000 miles per hour while somehow not becoming too large a portion of the spacecraft’s weight. But Ames had discovered other shapes that would fly, shapes that more closely resembled bathtubs than airplanes.

Reed read the research papers and began to build models of wingless aircraft, crafted out of paper and balsa, and his fellow engineers gathered to watch them fly up and down the Dryden hallways. Eventually, he convinced his superiors to grant him the small team of people and budget necessary to build full-sized aircraft. The group didn’t actually have any money for aircraft research; they only had money for building maintenance. So Reed’s boss took their initial budget out of that, and arranged collaboration and political cover from Ames, several hours away at Moffett Field.

Reed’s group of friends and colleagues slowly proved that by shaping a spacecraft’s body to provide lift, and by giving it a blunt nose, they could enable astronauts to fly back from space rather than just falling down from it. The team built and flew many lifting bodies, changing them on the fly as they had new ideas. They crafted each using wood and metal and whatever knowledge they had picked up from the last one, turning out “flying bathtubs and flatirons” on a relatively quick basis. The first lifting body aircraft was built in roughly three months for a little over $200,000 in 2010 dollars.

Some of the test pilots who flew these vehicles, often engineers or physicists, went on to become famous—men like Chuck Yeager, who broke the sound barrier, and Dick Scobee, pilot of the last Challenger mission. In some cases, the aircraft became famous, too. The M2-F2 went on to star in the opening credits of “The Six Million Dollar Man,” and a model of the X-24A became a well-used movie prop. Lifting body technology became part of the Space Shuttle and the X-33 spaceplane.

Lifting body research also became a useful way to figure out what the Soviets were doing.

Back in the USSR

The Russian side of the family tree is where surveillance and a “borrowed” design make an entrance. Western powers were the spies in this episode; they lifted the shape of a Russian spaceplane and gave it a new home in NASA Langley’s paper-strewn offices and wind tunnels, changing its name several times along the way.

On June 4, 1982, the Soviet Union launched a small spaceplane called the BOR-4 from Kapustin Yar missile test range in Astrakhan Oblast, Russia. BOR-4 wasn’t a real spacecraft; it was meant to test the thermal protection tiles of the Soviet space shuttle, Buran. It flew over Russia and came down again in light seas near the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean. A thin layer of clouds covered the sky, but the light remained bright and the Soviets found the craft quickly with a large trawler. They sent a boatload of men to attach a harness and pull it out of the water.

Naturally, when the Soviet Union launched something from a missile test range, other countries became strongly interested. A Royal Australian Air Force P-3 Orion reconnaissance aircraft flew over the BOR-4 splashdown site and took photos of the strangely shaped object. It had tall, inflatable orange cones sticking out of its nose and tail, making it easy to spot in rough seas. It had a scow-shaped nose and small, highly slanted wings.

The Australians weren’t sure what to make of it, but they weren’t at all shy about buzzing the trawler to take better photos (you can see just how close the Australians came in the video below). The Soviets set off smoke bombs near the spacecraft to prevent the P-3 from getting anything useful, but the wind blew up and the smoke failed to cover much. At the same time, a happy Soviet soldier was getting great video of the Orion P-3. Australian Defense Intelligence immediately sent their pictures to the CIA, while the Soviet soldier turned his film over to his superiors.

To Langley, with love

The CIA was decidedly unsure about what it was seeing. The Yanks were on the lookout for information about a Soviet space shuttle, but BOR-4 didn’t appear to be it. To figure out what they were seeing, the CIA eventually turned to NASA engineers at Langley Research Center in Virginia. Langley set about using the photos to create a near-duplicate of the BOR-4, then began wind tunnel testing the new shape.

As it turned out, the BOR-4 was actually a design that had lost out to what eventually became the Buran shuttle. Its design was based on a 1960s military spaceplane, the MiG-105 “Spiral,” which was itself a product of the Soviets’ own lifting body research program. Though Spiral had lost out to the Buran, its designers found a way to drag their cancelled creation back from the dead, developing the half-scale BOR-4 to test Buran’s thermal protection system.

The BOR-4, nicknamed “lapot” because its nose was shaped like the flat-nosed shoe of a Finnish peasant, might have made a great shuttle. The slanted fins gave it a lot of stability. As an aircraft, it had great cross range, an aerospace term used for the ability to turn and glide well to either side of its starting reentry trajectory. Langley engineers discovered that the shape was pleasantly stable and easy to fly all the way from the hypersonic speeds of orbital reentry down to the slow, subsonic speeds of runway landing. The Soviets liked it, too; they flew it at least 16 times during Buran development.

Overall, BOR-4 had a much better shape than NASA’s latest lifting body, the HL-10 (“HL” stands for “Horizontal Lander”)—so good that it became a favorite around Langley. In the true spirit of glasnost, the pilfered Russian design returned a few years later as the HL-20, proposed to serve as the emergency crew return vehicle for Reagan’s Space Station Freedom.

Back in the USSR, the BOR-4 and its BOR siblings were stored away, never to fly again. The Soviet Buran space shuttle program later failed for lack of funds. And in the US, Space Station Freedom was reorganized, shrunken, and redesigned several times before it emerged as the International Space Station.

Only the HL-20 lived on more or less intact, its nose rounded but still recognizably shoe-shaped.

NASA’s naturalized citizen

For a time, HL-20 was a social darling. It received several hundred million dollars over its lifetime from 1983 through 1991. Models and a full-size mockup were built. Langley volunteers dressed up in suit replicas and timed themselves trooping in and out of it. Studies were contracted on whether the project was feasible, studies were contracted on whether to build a prototype, and all of those studies were carefully again studied by multiple aerospace contractors.

Somehow, in the midst of all the studies, the project became too expensive and the now upgraded 10-person HL-20 was cancelled. The ongoing need for a crew return vehicle for the space station prevented the station from being fully manned until 2009, when NASA finally gave up and went back to reliable Russia, purchasing another Russian Soyuz as a “temporary” fix. The space station is now fully manned, but the lack of American vehicular access to the ISS remains a sore spot.

Had the HL-20 program progressed instead of becoming mired in studies, it might have overcome aerospace’s traditional Curse Of Things Not Yet Flown, an intense resistance toward betting one’s career on something that’s never been launched. In the NASA online book Wingless Flight: The Lifting Body Story, Dale Reed remarked, “While reading NASA and Air Force reports on design concepts for future spacecraft, I noticed a pattern developing. Although many of these studies included concepts of lifting reentry vehicles, when actual space vehicles were designed, they were always non-lifting or ballistic capsule-type vehicles.”

That observation remains true fifty years later. Even though several lifting body spacecraft have quite literally been studied to death over the years, only one civilian spacecraft has ever been built since the Apollo program. Although the lifting body program influenced the Space Shuttle, that vehicle ended up with wings. Another spacecraft, the X-37, followed the Shuttle’s design. Problems with a subcontractor’s tanks kept Lockheed-Martin’s X-33 firmly on the ground. Lifting bodies appeared to have fallen by the wayside.

Government surplus

A decade after HL-20’s cancellation, Jim Benson, Mark Sirangelo and Frank Taylor looked through NASA’s cancelled projects and saw the HL-20’s potential as a project that had already received many years of development. Benson, Sirangelo and Taylor formed part of the leadership of a small company called SpaceDev. SpaceDev was short for Space Development, Inc., and Benson, SpaceDev’s founder, often called it the world’s first commercial space exploration company.

Like several other companies and entrepreneurs at that time, SpaceDev wanted a vehicle to help them get into the low-earth orbit business. They looked at many vehicles, but only the HL-20 had such friendly flying characteristics combined with a thick pedigree of expensive studies. According to then-CEO of SpaceDev and current SNC Space Systems Chairman Mark Sirangelo, “We realized that the vehicle was one of the most tested and reviewed vehicles that had never flown.” Sirangelo approached the new NASA Administrator, Mike Griffin, who agreed that the HL-20 could be commercialized. In 2006, SpaceDev went on to execute a licensing agreement with NASA to use the HL-20’s design for its new Dream Chaser suborbital spacecraft. Somehow, the HL-20 had escaped NASA’s archives.

(SpaceDev’s founder, Jim Benson, left SpaceDev the same year to start a new suborbital space tourism company, Benson Space Company. Benson Space came up with a new vehicle all their own. For a while, Benson called the new vehicle “Dream Chaser”, causing some confusion, but eventually he agreed to switch to “BSC Spaceship.”)

Shortly after, the original Dream Chaser became a candidate for NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) Program. NASA still needed a means of taking cargo to and from the International Space Station, and it had decided to partner with private companies to get one. SpaceDev proposed the Dream Chaser atop a rocket booster composed of a bundle of smaller hybrid rocket motors.

But NASA didn’t ultimately select the Dream Chaser for COTS. SpaceDev ended up signing an unfunded Space Act Agreement, a means of working with NASA that didn’t involve funding. This kept the information transfer going and also effectively kept the company in the running for the next competition.

According to Mark Sirangelo, after losing the COTS competition, the company made a decision that it did not have the resources to create both a launch vehicle and continue the development of the Dream Chaser. So, it went out and found a rocket. In the fall of 2007, SpaceDev announced a partnership with United Launch Alliance to turn the Dream Chaser into an orbital vehicle by launching it on an Atlas V rocket.

Jim Benson’s own dream of going to space ended after he was diagnosed with a glioblastoma brain tumor in the spring of 2008. He died that fall. Benson Space ceased to exist, and not long afterward, the Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) announced that it had purchased and merged with SpaceDev.

With the merger, SpaceDev became SNC’s Space Systems Division, and it focused on building small satellites, components and subsystems, spacecraft propulsion systems, and orbital space transportation. SNC isn’t well-known as a spacecraft builder, but the company is now one of the largest spacecraft component builders in the United States. Spacecraft often have 10,000 to 20,000 parts, and SNC makes many of them. Not incidentally, SNC built the descent brake mechanism that lowered the Curiosity rover to the Martian surface a few weeks ago.

It was a good match for the Dream Chaser team, and it put them firmly back in the race.

Improvements come to the HL-20

Jim Benson was an ardent fan of hybrid rocket engines, which combine a solid propellant with a liquid. As in pure liquid systems, hybrids can be turned off in an emergency, but like solids, they can be easier to handle and less expensive to produce. The crucial difference, though, is that most hybrids are storable—that is, they can sit on the shelf (or in space) and their propellants don’t degenerate, dissipate, or explode.

SpaceDev’s team decided to outfit the Dream Chaser with hybrid engines, choosing HTPB (Hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene) and nitrous oxide—or, as Jim Benson used to say in presentations, “rubber and laughing gas.” The motors are similar to those that SpaceDev designed for SpaceShipOne, and which the company is now developing in a larger size for Virgin Galactic’s suborbital space tourist vehicle. Since the propellants can be stored easily, Dream Chaser would not only have the ability to propel itself, but also to sit up in orbit for a long time and then wake up and propel itself again.

“Dream Chaser is launcher-agnostic; it wasn’t designed for any particular rocket, and if there’s a cheaper launch out there that’s safe, Dream Chaser can take it.”

Talking about the addition of the rocket motors at the NewSpace conference last year, Sirangelo said that onboard propulsion solves three big issues. First, it provides an abort system in case something goes wrong on the launchpad, a necessary part of every manned rocket. Second, it means no “black zones” on the ascent. (Black zones are portions of the launch where a vehicle malfunction will result in the loss of the crew due to structural failure, and the fact that Dream Chaser doesn’t have any is a big plus for safety.) Finally, it gives Dream Chaser the flexibility to make a last-minute change to its landing location on the way down, making it possible to land in a thousand-mile range around the original planned location.

The design team also went to work on ways to turn the HL-20 into a better spaceplane. They improved the wings to give them more lift, streamlined the windows, and cut HL-20’s original ten passengers down to 7 to provide room for the rocket motors.

In January 2010, SNC won a $20 million Space Act Agreement to develop the Dream Chaser in the first round of the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program. In the second round, both SpaceDev and another company, Orbital Sciences, proposed variants of the HL-20, but Dream Chaser’s hybrid engines gave it a flexibility that the Orbital Sciences’ proposal didn’t have. Dream Chaser finally won the largest of the second-round awards.

NASA’s Commercial Crew Program evaluation team liked Dream Chaser’s ability to land at many ordinary airports in an emergency, and the fact that it could get down from orbit in about six to ten hours. They also liked Dream Chaser’s relatively low re-entry g-forces, which mean that a sick or wounded crew member (or a critical experiment) would have to endure far less trauma on the way down. Getting the crew out quickly upon landing was also easier, because Dream Chaser’s non-toxic hybrid rocket motors meant that no toxic gases would have to be hosed off the spacecraft after landing. The latest team to tackle the design had made Dream Chaser an even better emergency crew return vehicle.

Design choices

John Curry, a former Space Shuttle and Space Station Flight Director, now runs SNC’s Systems Engineering and Integration division. Speaking this year at Houston’s SpaceUp conference, Curry said that Dream Chaser will initially go to orbit atop an Atlas 402 rocket. The 402 is a relatively simple version of Boeing’s Atlas 5 launcher, which NASA’s evaluators liked because it did not include any solid rocket boosters, again improving crew safety. It has plenty of room for growth in the event that Dream Chaser gets heavier as designs are iterated, so there’s less of a risk that the vehicle might get to a point where it’s too big to be launched.

Dream Chaser will ride the Atlas without any sort of fairing, also making the system less complicated. But Curry also says that Dream Chaser is launcher-agnostic; it wasn’t designed for any particular rocket, and if there’s a cheaper launch out there that’s safe, Dream Chaser can take it.

When it returns from space, Dream Chaser’s landing speed is close to 200 knots. Designing landing gear to manage that speed is no minor issue, so SNC instead chose a landing skid for the nose to keep the design simple and lightweight.

SNC chose tiles and reinforced carbon-carbon composite as Dream Chaser’s thermal protection system for re-entry, much like the thermal protection system used for the Space Shuttle. Dream Chaser’s tiles are larger than the Space Shuttle’s and will last at least a few flights before they need replacement.

The Dream Chaser will have a large docking adapter at its rear—the new NASA Docking System that can dock with many other spacecraft. According to a June article at NASASpaceFlight.com, there’s no body flap to protect the adapter on the way down, but that’s by design; it’s cheaper to replace the adapter hardware after each flight than to worry about protecting it during re-entry.

According to Curry, SNC will also build three separate prototypes: a test fixture for fitting and testing parts, an Engineering Test Article (a highly accurate copy), and an orbital spacecraft. It’s a cautious and costly approach. But if all three of those prototypes are indeed built, SNC can possibly go back and finish the Test Article as an orbital vehicle if needed. That vehicle could well end up serving as SNC’s first unmanned Dream Chaser.

Making money without a crew

Mark Sirangelo has talked about SNC operating at least one Dream Chaser as an unmanned vehicle. The company is eyeing the market for cargo delivery to the International Space Station and for satellite repair, but the craft could handle anything that calls for long periods of time in orbit.

Satellite repair in particular is one of those ideas that has been perpetually “right around the corner,” given that there are tens of billions of dollars worth of satellites in orbit and repairs would theoretically be far cheaper than replacing them. Several aerospace companies are interested in doing repairs, and satellite companies have for the first time begun to express interest. One of the more common reasons for satellite failure is an undeployed solar panel, and a spacecraft waiting in orbit to solve problems like this could become quite popular.

Unfortunately, most satellite repair systems being discussed right now are envisioned for spacecraft in geosynchronous orbits, which are much higher than Dream Chaser is designed to reach. Such satellites are worth more because they cost far more to put into their orbits. Low Earth orbit (LEO) hardware is cheaper, which means Dream Chaser needs to get much cheaper to launch before it can make a business case for LEO satellite repair. An alternative would be making it refuelable in orbit, perhaps by switching from hybrid rockets to different non-toxic propellants, such as liquid oxygen and methane.

Right now, SNC is primarily a defense company, and there are interesting similarities between the Boeing X-37B reusable craft and the Dream Chaser, as they were originally designed for similar missions. Just as Boeing is considering scaling up the X-37B for passenger service, Dream Chaser might be suitable in its present size for at least some of the applications now being handled by the X-37B. Of course, no one outside the Air Force is quite sure what these missions are.

Money and politics

Jim Voss has spent 202 days aboard the Space Shuttle and the Space Station. He trained as a backup US astronaut for the Russian Space Station Mir and helped investigate the Challenger accident. He now works as SNC’s Vice-President of Space Exploration Systems. Explaining Dream Chaser to Euronews in July, he says, “We believe that if we continue to receive funding from the government that we will be ready to fly in 2016. And that will be our first orbital demonstration flight.”

In the interview, Voss speaks slowly and patiently; he’s accustomed to speaking in front of audiences. He describes Dream Chaser as a program that can’t be rushed—that is, “if it is funded.” Voss spent the majority of his long career at NASA, where programs come and go according to the whims of Congress.

“Sirangelo made a promise that, when Dream Chaser was finished, he would put the names of the Russian team right next to those of the American teams.”

Congress also has a say about NASA’s commercial space efforts. This year, the appropriations committees in both houses of the US Congress pared back NASA’s Commercial Space request for a third straight year. After the very public success of the SpaceX Dragon, Frank Wolf (R-VA), chair of the House subcommittee that sets NASA’s budget, agreed to support the slightly larger Senate budget for the program, all but assuring that the Senate’s $525M allocation for NASA’s Commercial Crew program will be finalized.

That agreement compelled NASA to cut the Commercial Crew program down to “two and a half” competitors; two companies would be fully funded, while the third would receive only half its funding request. When NASA considered its Commercial Crew choices for 2013-2014, SpaceX was closest to having its Commercial Crew vehicle ready—the cargo-carrying Dragon has already flown twice—and the company received $440 million as a full NASA partner. Boeing was also chosen, receiving $460 million. Dream Chaser survived in part because of its usefulness as an emergency crew vehicle. On August 3, NASA announced that Dream Chaser had received the “half” allocation of $212.5M.

Mark Sirangelo guesses that the program could possibly be done for approximately $1 billion to develop using the “lots-of-subcontractors” management style that has been typical of traditional US space efforts. That’s cheap by some standards, but not easy to fund themselves.

Although SNC is not a small company, that’s still a huge amount of cash to spend. According to Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations, speaking at the award announcement, NASA’s new set of milestones for SNC were carefully chosen to retire most or all of Dream Chaser’s technical risk. Still, the lower level of federal funding may push Dream Chaser’s first launch past the hoped-for 2016 flight. (Ideally, SNC would like to build many vehicles, using each one for 25 to 50 flights.)

SNC might accelerate development by taking on an investment partner, as Virgin Galactic has done. Some of the attributes that make Dream Chaser a great potential emergency crew vehicle would arguably make it a more comfortable vehicle for commercial space travelers, too, a fact that might help attract investors in today’s space-friendly environment. Visitors to any future low Earth orbit space station (such Bigelow Aerospace’s proposed commercial stations) might very well prefer a ride on Dream Chaser over any of the capsule vehicles.

The dreamers

Ending his NewSpace 2011 talk, Mark Sirangelo added his own story to Dream Chaser’s history. Several years ago, he visited Russia and met with three of the five Russian engineers from the BOR-4 program. Unaware until then that their little lapot lived on in another country, the engineers gave Sirangelo pictures of the P-3 surveillance plane, taken by the soldier on the trawler that recovered the BOR-4. Sirangelo made a promise to them that, when Dream Chaser was finished, he would put the names of the Russian team right next to those of the American teams. And he invited all of them to Dream Chaser’s first launch.

“I got a note from the daughter of one of the guys who died since I went there,” Sirangelo said, “and she said that one of the last things that he wanted to do was have her send me a letter reminding me of the promise I made to put his name on the Dream Chaser when we flew. And that’s what I think the space industry’s all about.”

That day last spring in Broomfield, one of the people watching the Dream Chaser hoisted to the sky was Steve Lindsey, former Chief of the Astronaut Corps., now SNC’s Director of Flight Operations and one of many people who hope to travel aboard Dream Chaser to orbit some time in the next few years. Wearing his orange coveralls, standard astronaut dress, he watched the craft cautiously rise, probably wishing it was further along, wondering whether the budget will carry the program through. He knows he’s not the first person to want to see the Dream Chaser in orbit.