It seems to be an axiom of the latest rush to space: If you need to develop a future space vehicle, look to the past.
The Orion spacecraft that will take Americans back to the moon is extremely similar to the Apollo vehicles of the 1960s and early 1970s. Bigelow Aerospace based its inflatable space station on the Transhab module developed in the 1990s by NASA.
It's fitting then that aerospace firm SpaceDev announced on Tuesday at the Space Symposium that it planned to bring together the latest incarnations of, not one, but two pieces of well-aged technology. The firm announced that it had signed an agreement with United Launch Alliance to pursue launching passengers in the company's Dream Chaser space vehicle using an Atlas V rocket.
The Dream Chaser is based on an early-1990s NASA concept, the HL-20 personnel launch system, that was designed to augment the Shuttle's ability to send passengers to orbit. Now, with SpaceDev aiming for initial operations to start in 2010 -- the year the Shuttle is due to retire -- the latest version of the HL-20 could help replace the Shuttle.
However, Dream Chaser is young compared to the technology that will boost the vessel into orbit. The Atlas V rocket is a system based on intercontinental ballistic missile technology from the early 1950s. According to Lockheed Martin's Atlas site:
For suborbital configurations, the Dream Chaser will instead use a booster that uses rubber and nitrous oxide (also known as laughing gas) to send the ship into the outer edges of Earth's atmosphere. The combination is the same fuel that the company provided for SpaceShipOne's historic trips into space, but which didn't make it into the design for SpaceShipTwo.
