The company is called Sierra Nevada Corporation, and its
Space Exploration Systems division isn’t exactly a couple of guys in a garage
somewhere – they’ve already received more than $200 million from NASA in
support of their orbiter design, which they call Dream Chaser. In fact, they’ve
been building components for various NASA projects for years; one of their most
recent accomplishments was the very successful “sky-crane” system used to lower
the Curiosity probe onto Mars. Altogether,
the company claims to have flown over 4,000 different constructs on more than
400 space flights. But the Dream Chaser program is their first venture into
manned spacecraft, and they’re definitely not operating on the same scale as
Space-X, let alone Boeing – and both of their larger competitors are further
along in the design and building cycle. And yet I was immediately drawn to the
Dream Chaser story for reasons that had nothing to do with my love for
spacecraft or identification with underdogs and trouble-makers…
First off, the Dream Chaser design uses a composite
materials hull – much like Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner airliner, but completely
unlike anything else ever flown into space by people. This makes the vehicle
cheaper to build and maintain than any earlier system, as well as faster and
easier to produce. Up until this point the largest fleet of reusable spacecraft
ever built, the Space Shuttle program, included a maximum of five flyable
units; if Sierra Nevada can gain acceptance of the design they could
conceivably mass-produce it, lowering the cost still further. If someone can come
up with an equally affordable launcher (and several companies have suggested
ideas for that) this modest seven-passenger design could become available to a
huge range of private users, effectively opening space to a number of people
previously imagined only by science fiction writers…
Now, I could point out that the existence of dozens of
stories and novels about commercial space exploration has not had much effect
on the development of privately-owned spacecraft to date, but I can’t help thinking
that such arguments are actually looking at things backward. What makes the
Dream Chaser program so remarkable lies in the early years of the last century.
For more than a decade after the first powered flight by the Wright Brothers,
airplanes were well beyond the reach of all but the very richest private
citizens; at first more curiosities ridden by daredevils and stuntmen (somewhat
like the “space tourists” of recent years), or military vehicles operated in
defense of their countries by men who were already considered insanely brave by
nearly everyone else. It wasn’t until the appearance of standard designs,
mass-produced aircraft that could be counted on to behave in more or less
predictable ways that the commercial use of air travel became both acceptable
and affordable – and changed the world we live in, although not always for the
better…
I can’t tell you if the availability of affordable launch
vehicles will lower the barriers to commercial space flight the way it did for
commercial aviation. But as a business consultant and instructor I can definitely
tell you that none of the fanciful civilian uses of space we’ve been talking
about and writing about for the last century or so will ever be possible so
long as spacecraft are assembled one-by-one, by hand, and take decades to build
and months to prepare for launch. Sierra Nevada Corporation may not, in fact,
be building the spacecraft equivalent of the DC-3, or the Ford Tri-Motor, or
even the Curtis Flying Jenny; they may not ultimately succeed in the Dream
Chaser venture at all. But those equivalents are coming, and we may all live
long enough to see them…
It makes you wonder what else we might find on a random
visit to the newsstand, doesn’t it?
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