Businesses take flight, with help from NASA

Kenneth Chang

Sitting in a testing facility at the University of Colorado, the inner shell of the Dream Chaser space plane looks like the fuselage of an old DC-3.

The test structure has been pushed and pulled to see how it holds up to the stresses and strains of spaceflight. With an additional infusion of money from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the company that makes the Dream Chaser, Sierra Nevada Space Systems, hopes to complete the rest of the structure and eventually take astronauts to orbit.

“Our view is if we could stop buying from the Russians, if we could make life cheaper for NASA, and if we could build a few vehicles that do other things in low-Earth orbit that are valuable, isn't that, at the end of the day, a good thing?” said Mark N. Sirangelo, the company's chairman.

The Dream Chaser is one of several new spacecraft that companies are hoping to launch into space with help from the government. Last year, the Obama administration pushed through an ambitious transformation for NASA: cancelling the Ares I rocket, which was to be the successor to the current generation of space shuttles, and turning to the commercial sector for astronaut transportation.

So far, most of the attention in this new commercial space race has focused on Boeing, which has five decades of experience building spacecraft, and Space Exploration Technologies Corporation — SpaceX, for short — a brash upstart that gained credibility last year with two launchings of its Falcon 9 rocket.

SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, a founder of PayPal and chief executive of Tesla Motors, already has a NASA contract for delivering cargo to the space station, and says that it can easily add up to seven seats to its Dragon cargo capsule to make it suitable for passengers. Boeing is also designing a capsule, capable of carrying six passengers, under the corporate-sounding designation of CST-100.

But Boeing and SpaceX are not the only competitors seeking to provide space taxi services, a programme that NASA calls commercial crew. Last year, in the first-round financing provided for preliminary development, Sierra Nevada Space Systems won the largest award: $20 million out of a total of $50 million.

Announcement in March

In December, another space company, Orbital Sciences Corporation, announced it had submitted a similar bid for a space plane it wants financed during the second round. NASA is to announce the winners by the end of March, and they will divide $200 million.

About half of NASA's $19 billion budget goes toward human spaceflight — the space shuttles, the International Space Station — and $200 million this year is just a small slice.

“If this is indeed the path to do this work, it's probably not what they should be putting into it,” said Mr. Sirangelo, who is also chairman emeritus of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, a trade group. “But on the other hand, it's a lot more than we had before. And it's an acknowledgment there's momentum in the industry and what we're trying to accomplish. So that's good.”

After the second round, NASA would like narrow its choices down to two, maybe three, systems to finance.

The blueprint for NASA, passed by Congress last year and signed into law by President Obama, calls for spending on commercial crew to rise to $500 million each year in 2012 and 2013.

Mr. Sirangelo said the company had invested its own money into the Dream Chaser — indeed, more than the $20 million that NASA has provided. Over the past year, the company has done a test-firing of the engines it plans to use on the Dream Chaser, and it dropped a scale model of the spacecraft from a helicopter to verify the aerodynamics.

The design of the Dream Chaser also has a long lineage, inspired by a Soviet spacecraft. In 1982, an Australian reconnaissance aircraft photographed a Russian trawler pulling something with stubby wings out of the Indian Ocean. It turned out to be a test flight of a space plane called the Bor-4, and the craft captured enough curiosity that engineers at NASA Langley copied it.

NASA called its version the HL-20, and for a while in 1991, it looked to be the low-cost choice for taking astronauts to and from the space station. Then the NASA administrator who liked it, Vice Adm. Richard Truly of the Navy, left, and the man who replaced him, Daniel S. Goldin, thought it was not cheap enough and ended the work.

The Dream Chaser design keeps the exact outer shape from the HL-20 — a decision that allows Sierra Nevada to take advantage of years of wind tunnel tests that Langley had performed — while modifying the design within. The biggest change is the addition of two engines, which reduces the number of passengers to seven from 10, but adds manoeuvrability. To finish developing the Dream Chaser would require less than $1 billion, Mr. Sirangelo said, and it could be ready to fly an orbital test flight in three years.

He imagines that one flight could combine a number of tasks — taking astronauts to the space station and then stopping on the return trip to repair or refuel a satellite. Officials at Orbital Sciences — a company in Dulles, Va., that builds and launches rockets and satellites for everything from television broadcasts to scientific research — say they are excited by the possibilities of commercial crew, but they are more cautious.

Its space plane design is a refinement of the HL-20. Following in the pattern of tapping Greek mythology for the names of its spacecraft, Orbital calls its plane Prometheus. Orbital says development of Prometheus would cost $3.5 billion to $4 billion, which would include the cost of upgrading the Atlas V rocket and two test flights. With enough financial support, David W. Thompson, chief executive of Orbital, is sure that his company can build and operate Prometheus. But he is less sure that his industry is at a tipping point for spaceflight to become much more common, driving down prices and opening up space to new businesses. “I think it depends on what the demand curve really is,” he said. “I would say I'm highly sceptical.”— © New York Times News Service