Sierra Space announced today on the X platform that its Dream Chaser “Tenacity” orbiter has arrived at “NASA’s Armstrong In-Space Propulsion facility in Ohio for thermal vacuum testing. This will be its last testing phase in Ohio before it makes its way to Kennedy Space Center in Florida.” The Armstrong test facility is part of NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

A Long Path To The Launch Pad

Dream Chaser is the company’s reusable lifting-body spaceplane based on NASA’s HL-20 Personnel Launch System, first studied by NASA Langley in 1990. That spacecraft was intended to ferry astronauts to the proposed Space Station Freedom, which eventually evolved into the International Space Station.

While no flight hardware for the HL-20 was ever built by NASA, the idea of a relatively low-cost, lifting-body design that could land on conventional runways persisted. Both Orbital Sciences (now Northrup-Grumman) and SpaceDev (now Sierra Space) proposed HL-20 derivatives for ferrying crews and supplies to the ISS.

Orbital never built its version, called “Prometheus,” a Blended Lifting Body (BLB) spacecraft, after failing to be selected for a CCDev phase 2 award by NASA. Afterward, Orbital announced that it was winding down its effort to build a commercial spacecraft and discontinued the program.

Sierra, for its part, also faced selection hurdles: its design for a crewed Dream Chaser was not selected by NASA for the final phase of development of commercial crew (CCtCap). The company persisted, however, and NASA selected a cargo-only version of Dream Chaser for its Commercial Resupply Services 2 (CRS2) program.

Space Flight Nearly In Sight

“We are coming out of years of development, years of hard work and years of resolving tough engineering challenges that come from revolutionary new ways of doing things,” said Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice last month.

If it tests successfully at the Armstrong Test Facility, Dream Chaser will make its maiden flight sometime in 2024 on top of a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket.

Author: Charles Boyer

NASA kid from Cocoa Beach, FL, born of Project Apollo parents and family. I’m a writer and photographer sharing the story of spaceflight from the Eastern Range here in Florida.