There鈥檚 a new kid on the commercial spaceflight block. On Thursday, NASA announced that the second round of contracts for commercial resupply missions to the International Space Station will include , whose Dream Chaser spacecraft will bring cargo back from the ISS within 3 to 6 hours.
It was hoped that the Dream Chaser could carry astronauts to the ISS as a replacement for NASA鈥檚 retired space shuttle. That dream was disappointed in 2014, when NASA awarded 鈥渟pace taxi鈥� contracts to two other companies, SpaceX and Boeing.
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But the craft鈥檚 ability to cut the return trip from the ISS from 24 hours to 3, plus its soft landing, will allow a wide range of experiments with living and delicate systems in space.
鈥淭his is a huge advance,鈥� said ISS chief scientist Julie Robinson in a press conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Current studies that involve bringing home live organisms can only study characteristics that won鈥檛 change in landing, such as bone density. Behaviour or genetic changes require quicker access to the samples, she says. 鈥淚f they have a hard landing or land at sea, you鈥檝e really disrupted that before the scientists can get at it. Rapid return and soft landing is really valuable.鈥�
The winners also included SpaceX and Orbital Sciences, which have been supplying cargo to the ISS for a few years. But those two companies have recently suffered high-profile failures: Orbital Sciences鈥� Antares rocket exploded just after a launch in October 2014, and SpaceX鈥檚 Dragon capsule in June 2015.
Choosing a third company to run ISS resupply missions will help cover any future gaps, says ISS program manager Kirk Shireman.
鈥淔rom an operational perspective, it鈥檚 important to have more than one supply chain,鈥� he said. 鈥淚f you lose one, you have the ability to have another right after from a dissimilar supplier.鈥�
Each company will fly a minimum of 6 missions to the ISS beginning in 2019. The details of those missions will be determined later this year.
(Image: Sierra Nevada Corp)
