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NASA Awards Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser an ISS Commercial Resupply Contract (examiner.com)
MarkWhittington writes: The Verge reported that NASA has awarded the second round of contracts for the commercial resupply program. Two companies, SpaceX, and Orbital Sciences, which have been hauling cargo to the International Space Station in the first phase of the program, will receive contracts to fly at least six flights each to the ISS through 2024, the anticipated end of operations year for the space station. But Sierra Nevada has also gotten a six flight commitment, using a cargo version of its Dream Chaser spacecraft.
Cool! It will be great to see some winged spacecraft again!
Am I reading this wrong or is this essentially a contract to ULA by proxy as the Dream Chaser is launched atop an Altas V? ULA had the CST-100 in development as their direct crew / cargo craft but it was knocked out of competition.
So unless I'm mistaken this end up being a contract for the 3 main launch systems, SpaceX, Orbital Sciences and ULA.
If the cargo version of the Dream Chaser (which I note is also winged and reusable), can be launched on the Falcon 9X (I think this is the version that has the reusable first stage) then almost the entire vehicle is reusable!
I think it will, unfortunately, still require a (small?) second stage to get it into orbit but perhaps the Dream Chaser (cargo version) can boost itself into orbit. In any case it would provide another reusable re-entry option for the Falcon (the Dragon space capsule of course has been proven to be recoverable).
Interesting to note that the wings on the Dream Chaser are folding so it can fit inside a launch fairing. Is this the normal launch profile? Does it never launch "naked" with wings unfolded? Perhaps the aerodynamics are just too problematic for a winged vehicle on the tip of a booster stack. Maybe that's why the crewed version didn't get approved (it would not be good to have the crew inside a launch fairing in case of an accident).
They're intrinsically corrupt, and specialize in getting work by greasing the palms of politicians and giving sinecure jobs to retired high ranking military types.
Unusually for a medium large defense contractor, SNC is not a publicly held company. It's completely owned by a husband and wife team, the Ozmans. They are of Turkish decent and Mr Ozman was originally a Turkish national. I have met them and had some casual conversations.
The fact that SNC has no share holders changes their reporting requirements and makes it easy for them to do things for people who "help" them.
Before I worked at SNC they were closely involved both professionally and personally with JIm Gibbons, former Governor and House Member for Nevada. He's a real piece of work. While he was in office SNC hired Gibbon's wife as a consultant for a very murky position. When this came out there were a lot of calls for an investigation but nothing happened. The Ozmans and Gibbons went on a junket to Turkey and Gibbons was never able to produce any documentation showing that he had paid for anything on the trip. That looks like a form of bribery to anyone who has a pulse, but again there was no follow up. It's interesting that the owners of a military contracting company should be so close to a politition called "one of America's worst governors" by CREW.
SNC has huge clout in Nevada because they are the biggest military contractor with headquarters in the state. Other contractor do a lot of work there, but have there home office somewhere else. This means that any Federal level militarily pork that is going into Nevada is very likely to end up at SNC.
I'm 100% certain that if you were to spend some time searching press releases, you would discover that a fair number of former high level government/military types from the space program took their retirement and now have juicy jobs at SNC. They're might even be some fancy vacations/fact finding trips in the mix, but I bet that the kind of inducements being offered at this point are a lot less crude.
SNC getting a plumb ISS resupply contract is very strange. SNC does not build any of the major Dream Chaser components themselves. United Launch Alliance is supplying the launch system and Lockheed-Martin builds the supply capsule. The capsule design is based on old NASA lifting body work. It's not clear if SNC is building anything, even the avionics. What they appear to be doing is acting as a systems integrator with no investment in original technology. They may be the only organization in the world that is getting paid for space access that does not have any proprietary expertise in space technology. SNC also bought a micro-satellite company, but that has very little to do with the resupply contract.
So without doing something underhanded, how does a company with such shallow technical credentials get a contract like this? (Sound of crickets...)
There is just something sexy about this little craft, and I think it has some of the same allure as the old Boeing X20 Dyna-Soar design. It's kind of an irrational thing, but I'm glad they got the nod as I've really wanted to see it fly. The Dyna-Soar was also a small design winged craft meant to be put on top a rocket for launch, but never got past design and planning. To quote the Wikipedia page, it "suffered from two major problems: uncertainty over the booster to be used to send the craft into orbit, and a lack of a clear goal for the project."
Since NASA is effectively becoming a procurement department to outsource everything it used to do, why not just get rid of NASA entirely? Put the whole contract, etc on eBay.
All mass human endeavors are essentially some form of distributed work. At some point the work is handed-off from one entity to another. What has mattered, historically, is who makes the decisions.
If you look at NASA historically from their early formation as NACA, their role has been to steer new technology to push the envelope. At times they adapted existing technology to suit their purposes like the Mercury with Redstone ICBM rockets or Gemini with Titan II, and at other times they used purpose-built machines that were designed under their supervision like the Saturn rockets and eventually the Shuttle. NASA didn't manufacture these themselves, but they did use them to attempt to do new things.
Getting to Earth Orbit and remaining in space generally isn't pushing the limit anymore. If anything it's figuring out how to make-routine something that we've successfully done many times. As such it makes sense that now we should figure how to do it cheaper and with more capacity and with more frequency. That hadn't been NASA's mission, and it really shouldn't be NASA's mission. They need to figure out our return to the Moon. They need to figure out how to get to Mars. They need to find some awesome uses for Lagrange Points. They need to investigate new propulsion systems that reduce the demand for reaction mass. Once a given technology is reasonably mature they need to hand it off and pick up the next new thing.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.