The Dream Chaser spaceplane, which has been under development for two decades, now seems like it might be further than ever from taking flight.
On Thursday, NASA, confirming an earlier Ars Technica report, said the first flight of the winged spacecraft will no longer berth with the International Space Station. Rather, the space agency said, the Dream Chaser program would be "best served" by a free flight demonstration.
"Development of new space transportation systems is difficult and can take longer than what’s originally planned," said Dana Weigel, manager of NASA's International Space Station Program, in a news release. "As NASA and its partners look toward space station deorbit in 2030, this mutually agreed to decision enables testing and verification to continue on Dream Chaser, as well as demonstrating the capabilities of the spaceplane for future resupply missions in low Earth orbit."
A dream delayed
Development work on Dream Chaser began in 2004, when a US company named SpaceDev resurrected a NASA concept known as the HL-20 spaceplane. Sierra Nevada Corporation acquired SpaceDev in 2008 and proceeded to win $362 million in NASA contracts to work on crewed transportation to the space station.
Sierra Nevada ultimately lost out on the Commercial Crew competition to Boeing and SpaceX, but in 2016, a cargo version of Dream Chaser was on-ramped onto a NASA program to deliver cargo to the space station. As part of its contract, Sierra Space was awarded a minimum of seven flights to the space station.
The total value of the contracts for dozens of supply missions, to be split among SpaceX, Northrop Grumman, and Sierra, was $14 billion. A NASA spokesperson declined Thursday to say how much money has been allocated to Sierra for its work on a cargo version of Dream Chaser.