Sierra Space is gearing up for the future use of its Dream Chaser spacecraft to support commercial astronaut activity with a training center based at Kennedy Space Center, the company said Tuesday.
The Human Spaceflight Center and Astronaut Training Academy will be led by company president Janet Kavandi, a former astronaut who flew on three space shuttle missions and retired from NASA in 2019.
“Our intent is for Sierra Space to stand at the forefront of the commercial space industry,” said Kavandi in a press release, outlining how the academy “will pave the way for our company to do just that — by selecting, training and preparing the very best space exploration talent to lead the way in this new era of low-Earth orbit destinations. We are excited to start this effort at the Kennedy Space Center during this truly formative stage in the new space economy.”
Details about where, how big, what facilities would be in place and how many people it would employ have not been made final. Kavandi will head the organization from the company’s KSC-based offices.
The company’s Dream Chaser spacecraft, which resembles a mini space shuttle, has been in the works for more than 13 years. The first operational version, named Tenacity, will be for cargo and is slated to be launched atop a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket in early 2023 to bring up to 12,000 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station. It will join SpaceX and Northrop Grumman as NASA’s contracted commercial cargo providers to the station.
A human-rated version, though, has always been on the roadmap for the company that was branched off from Sierra Nevada Corp. in 2021. It’s about 1/4th the size of space shuttle orbiters, and would support up to seven crew members and supplies. It’s designed to glide back to Earth and land at the former space shuttle landing facility now run by Space Florida, the state’s aerospace economic development agency.
A passenger-ready Dream Chaser would be operational by 2026, the company said. It would be the primary spacecraft to dock with the planned Orbital Reef commercial space station, which Sierra Space is investing in alongside Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Boeing. Plans are for it to be on orbit and operational by 2027.
Orbital Reef is one of three commercial space stations in development with some NASA funding along with Axiom Space, which is building their version by first attaching modules to the ISS, and a project called Starlab from Lockheed Martin, Nanoracks and Voyager Space.
In preparation, the KSC-based center will recruit, train and prepare humans to support those company milestones, and Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice praised Kavandi’s experience to help best achieve success, noting she flew on the final space shuttle-Mir docking as well as one of the assembly missions for the ISS. She also served as NASA’s Deputy Chief of the Astronaut Office, Flight Crew Operations Director and Center Director at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, and is a 2019 inductee to the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame.
“Janet has an unequaled level of expertise and experience that uniquely qualifies her for this one-of-a-kind role,” Vice said. “She will do an incredible job training and preparing humanity for this next industrial revolution occurring in space.”
Kavandi’s plan is to train professional career astronauts that will have long-term operational stays at Orbital Reef, including Sierra Space employees that would get a skillset similar to NASA astronauts; specialist astronauts who would be customers taught how to perform activities such as science and manufacturing in space; and participatory astronauts, such as space tourists.
The company said its professional astronaut selection process will begin in late 2023 with training to start in 2024 to achieve the ability to begin flying by 2026 and help construct the space station.
She said the training, which could take as long 1 1/2 years for its professionals, would be comprehensive.
“First, we will train internally, so our own mission control team will be trained with our own astronauts in our own simulators and in our own mission control center as one team,” she said. “For special training, like in neutral buoyancy labs – the big pools where we train for EVA or extra-vehicular activity – or in aircraft on microgravity flights, we will seek outside support from the best in the industry.”
