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Back in the 1990’s, NASA asked NC State and NC A&T to work on a test article for their proposed HL-20 spacecraft — a craft they were considering at the time for to replace the Space Shuttle for ferrying astronauts to and from low earth orbit. State and A&T did a great job and moved NASA’s program along, but when George Bush announced the Vision for Space Exploration program the HL-20 ended up being a casualty.
Well, sort of. Sierra Nevada Corporation, a pretty big space vendor (they also have offices in Durham) took it up, renamed the HL-20 the Dreamchaser, and have been working steadily to make it a reality. They’re one of the three partners in the program to return Americans to orbit using private companies, along with Boeing and SpaceX — who are using traditional capsules for their efforts.
Long story short, SNC announced on Thursday that they are going to orbit the Dreamchaser from Kennedy Space Center in 2016, and have bought an Atlas V booster to get the ship up there. They made their announcement at KSC and had the big wheels of NASA there when they did — the NASA Administrator, the director of KSC, the president of ULA (who will provide the booster) and others. Oh, and yours truly was there for the announcement since I was already in town for the launch that evening of the TDRS-L satellite.
When I asked SNC VP Mark Sirangelo about the work State did, he could not have been more pleased and he said he hopes to re-engage the university in the future.
I think this is great, but we need to stop playing around in LEO, and get out there and start mining some asteroids.
If SNC needs any office space near JSC, there’s about 3 different 4-5 story buildings standing totally empty after the shutdown of the shuttle program. NASA is a shell of what it once was and will never make a comeback. I could see it dissolved altogether in 15 years.
Tex said: ” NASA is a shell of what it once was and will never make a comeback.”
Wow…
Personally… I did not realize that things with NASA had evolved to that point.I’m not a “rocket scientist”… but my Pop was for 37 years…. with Bell Labs at the Carolina Missile Plant in old B’ton.
But I know this….
In my lifetime, nothing has done more to build common ground among a very diverse people/nation than NASA and the space program.
Starting with the launches on TV
(watching those during elementary school in the 1960s was the second coolest thing in school… right behind watching the ACC bball tournament in the classroom on that Friday in early March).Then came the moon trips…
Later on… it was the Space Shuttle.Now it’s all just corporate stuff and unmanned visits to faraway places….
Just another sign that, for some of us, the world we live in is not the world we grew up in…..
BUT! Does anybody else ask the question…
Why hasn’t some ‘smart person in Washington (or where ever the ‘smart people’ hang out these days) figured out how to NOT throw the baby out with the bathwater ????
#NCSU-North Carolina's #1 FOOTBALL school!If SNC needs any office space near JSC, there’s about 3 different 4-5 story buildings standing totally empty after the shutdown of the shuttle program.
SNC is based in Colorado, and has offices all around the country, including Durham, where they are full of NC State graduates. Mark Sirangelo, the executive VP of SNC, told me that the office was “all red and white inside.” For the Dreamchaser, they are leasing facilities from NASA/KSC and are going to add 500 jobs down there — hence their partnership with Space Florida.
NASA is a shell of what it once was and will never make a comeback.
Considering that Congress gave them full funding for the next generation of extra-orbital spacecraft development, and that they are going to have a test flight of the Orion capsule this year where the mission design is essentially equivalent to that of the Apollo 4 mission of 1967, which validated the Apollo flight control system and heat shield at re-entry conditions planned for the return from lunar missions. That is necessary to validate the same items – flight controls, the heat shield at 20,000 MPH (far faster than the Shuttle) etc. it is hard to agree with that.
On top of that NASA is fostering the development of at least one and probably two low-earth orbit vehicles, the Boeing CST-100, the SpaceX Dragon and the Dreamchaser from SNC. Test flights of all three are expected in the next 18 months.
I saw the ground-test article of Orion in the VAB last Thursday when I was at the Cape for the launch of the TDRS-L satellite. The flight-test article is about 2/3 completed in another building and will be put on a Delta IV in a few months.
In my lifetime, nothing has done more to build common ground among a very diverse people/nation than NASA and the space program.
Well, I guess that kinda explains why Muslim outreach is now one of NASA’s “foremost” tasks.
“When I became the NASA administrator, (President Obama) charged me with three things,” Bolden said in the interview which aired last week. “One, he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math; he wanted me to expand our international relationships; and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.”
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