Military Transport Space Shuttle, Deliver Military Cargo Anywhere on Earth in Less Than 3 Hours

 

The Pentagon has signed an agreement with Sierra Space, developer of the Dream Chaser shuttle, to develop the glide-like spacecraft for military transport missions. The goal is to develop a craft that can transport people or cargo anywhere on Earth or to some locations in space within three hours. While the Dream Chaser is limited in how much cargo it can transport, the procedures and tactics the two parties work out will likely become the foundation of military space transport for decades to come.

Sierra Space, a Louisville, Colorado-based division of defense contractor Sierra Nevada Corp., made an announcement about the partnership earlier this month on its website. “Both parties will collaboratively explore space transportation as a new mode of point-to-point global terrestrial delivery of materiel and personnel, as an alternative and complement to traditional air, land and surface modes,” the company wrote. The agreement also covers evaluating Sierra Space’s new space glider vehicle, Dream Chaser, for Department of Defense use.

Dream Chaser is a crewed/uncrewed spaceplane in the Space Shuttle mold. Dream Chaser is based on NASA’s HL-20 lifting body spaceplane concept, which in turn is based on the former Soviet Union’s BOR-4 spaceplane. All three concepts involve a shuttle-like craft with a flattened body and upturned wingtips. Dream Chaser is designed to ride atop a rocket into space and then rendezvous with a space station in low-Earth orbit or glide to a runway landing on Earth.

The current Dream Chaser is pilotless and, with the help of the disposable Shooting Star cargo module, can transport up to 12,000 pounds of cargo into space. Sierra Nevada has a contract with NASA to fly seven resupply missions to the International Space Station, starting in 2023. Dream Chaser is human-rated, meaning it is designed to be rigorous enough to carry humans into space. A future manned version will be able to carry up to seven people.

The Pentagon has been eager to exploit the benefits of the commercial space industry. Although the military has investigated moving people and equipment by spacecraft for more than a half-century, the process has proved impractical until now. Not only are the various competing companies leading to faster, more responsive launches, they are also lowering the cost per pound of getting humans and cargo into orbit.

If the Dream Chaser really can fly military missions to transport cargo (and at some point people) to any place on the planet within three hours, that is much quicker than military sealift, which could take weeks, or the 15+ hours it would take a military transport aircraft like the C-17 Globemaster III to reach the far corners of the globe.

Dream Chaser is just a quarter the size of the original Space Shuttle, and its relatively small cargo makes transporting military personnel and military cargoes in all but the most extraordinary of circumstances impractical. The real value in the Pentagon/Sierra Nevada deal is that the two sides will work out how larger, more powerful spacecraft will operate in principle in the not-so-distant future. Once a rocket travels to a crisis zone and unloads sorely needed ammunition, weapons, and human troops, how does it get back? All of these things will have to be sorted out if space becomes a mode of transport for America’s military.