BOULDER, Colo. – NASA's focus on the value of innovative commercial space firms took center stage in back-to-back meetings with a private space station module builder and a company developing a new space plane to fly passengers to and from Earth orbit. The meetings were led by NASA's deputy chief Lori Garver.
Garver visited the brains behind the Sierra Nevada Corporation's (SNC) Dream Chaser spacecraft. Her Feb. 5 visit with the Colorado-based company stemmed from the partnership being carried out under an award of the space agency’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program.
The seven-person Dream Chaser vehicle is based on NASA HL-20 lifting body work, a legacy design completed in the 1980s and 1990s at the space agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.
Dream Chaser would fly to the International Space Station and back. The vehicle is slated to launch vertically on an Atlas 5 rocket and land horizontally on conventional runways. Space.com
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