The Dream Chaser is still chasing a future in orbit. The Sierra Nevada Corporation says this week that it will build a new version of the space plane to work with Stratolaunch, the mega-jet designed to be an airborne platform for launching spacecraft.
Up until mid-September, Sierra Nevada was still in the running to send NASA astronauts to the International Space Station aboard its winged Dream Chaser space plane. But on Sept. 16, NASA whittled its three candidates down to two, selecting Boeing and SpaceX for the mission. Sierra Nevada's leaders have promised to fight the decision, arguing their platform is just as good as the other companies'. And in the meantime, they're not twiddling their thumbs, announcing the deal with Stratolaunch on Tuesday.
RELATED: Everything you need to know about the Dream Chaser, America's next space plane.
Stratolaunch, featured in PM's April 2012 cover story, is the kind of thing that jumps into your mind when you read the word "behemoth." It's a 385-foot-long, six-engine, double-fuselage super-airplane built from the pieces of two 747s. Software billionaire Paul Allen is bankrolling the endeavor; famed spacecraft builder Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites is supposed to bring it to life.
The point of this airborne colossus is to overcome one of the major limitations of space launches—that is, it takes a lot of energy to lift something straight off the ground, but less energy if a big plane carries it to altitude. Stratolaunch could carry a modified Dream Chaser for an airborne launch to low-Earth orbit; Sierra Nevada says this system could carry three people.
Stratolaunch is due to begin its test flights in 2016.
RELATED: Say hello to Stratolaunch, the world's largest space plane.
Andrew's from Nebraska. His work has also appeared in Discover, The Awl, Scientific American, Mental Floss, Playboy, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn with two cats and a snake.
