Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dream Chaser made its first free flight over the weekend. Unfortunately, the left side landing gear failed to deploy, damaging the prototype spacecraft. Bummer.
The company released a video late Monday showing the flight, and though the video mentions the incident, it stops moments before touchdown. The unmanned lifting body spacecraft was released from a helicopter at 12,000 feet and made a glide flight back to Edwards Air Force Base in California.
Sierra Nevada's Mark Sirangelo told reporters in a teleconference this morning that the flight went well and was a success, other than the landing gear problem.
"It was a very good day, marred by a small glitch at the end of the day," Sirangelo said. "But it did not take away from a pretty amazing aerospace achievement, in my view of it."
The Dream Chaser is one of three designs competing for a NASA contract that would fill the gap left by the retirement of the space shuttle program to once again fly astronauts to the International Space Station and elsewhere in low earth orbit. The other two designs — from SpaceX and Boeing — are both traditional capsules.
Sierra Nevada is instead borrowing on lifting body designs that date back to the 1960s. Perhaps the most famous lifting body aircraft is NASA's M2-F2 that also experienced an accident upon touchdown, a scene that was played during the introduction of the 1970s television show, The Six Million Dollar Man. Saturday's incident sounds relatively minor by comparison.
The Dream Chaser is a distant relative of the Northrop M2-F2, though it is far more advanced and more closely related to NASA's HL-20. Unlike the winged space shuttle or traditional aircraft, the Dream Chaser does not generate lift from wings, but rather from the shape of the entire fuselage.
In a statement released over the weekend, Sierra Nevada said the automated flight was going well, with the spacecraft following the proper trajectory throughout the flight profile. Even the flare and touchdown went exactly as planned. But the left landing gear did not deploy properly, so the Dream Chaser veered off the runway and was damaged during the rollout. The landing gear on the prototype is borrowed from a fighter jet, but the final version will use a different design, something that was planned well before Saturday's flight. The company says the deployment issue was a mechanical failure, was not software related and is not expected to be a serious setback for the project.
Last year Sierra Nevada was awarded $212.5 million from NASA to further develop the Dream Chaser. The spacecraft is designed to carry up to seven astronauts to low earth orbit, and will be launched on top of an Atlas 5 rocket. Unlike the capsules from Boeing and SpaceX, the Dream Chaser is capable of returning to earth and landing on a runway like its space shuttle cousin.
