The unlikely Cold War origins of America’s most intriguing spacecraft

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An illustration of the Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dream Chaser

Spacecraft. (Sierra Nevada Corp.)

By Christian Davenport February 16 at 11:00 AM

 

The Russians were obviously up to something. A Soviet ship out in the middle of the Indian Ocean was struggling to pull some kind of vessel out of the water, though it was unclear exactly what. So while an Australian P-3 Orion spy plane patrolling overhead that day in 1982 made a few passes, intelligence officers snapped photos.
The Australians passed the images onto their intelligence counterparts at the CIA, which in turn looped in NASA officials. And together they helped solve the mystery: It was the BOR-4 “an unmanned prototype spacecraft used to test heat-shield ideas for what the Soviets envisioned would be their space shuttle program,” according to a NASA account of the incident.
In other words, a space plane.
Those Cold War spy images have suddenly become very relevant to space flight today. Last month, NASA announced that the Dream Chaser, a snub-nosed space vehicle developed by the Sierra Nevada Corp., was chosen as one of the vehicles to fly cargo to the International Space Station.
The award marked the latest chapter in winding tale of a captivating little spacecraft that looks like a miniature version of the space shuttle, an old idea born new again. It comes as NASA has helped touch off a renaissance in the commercial space industry by awarding millions in contracts to companies to develop new space vehicles that could take cargo and eventually astronauts to the space station.

Mark Sirangelo, head of the Sierra Nevada Corp.'s space systems. (Sierra Nevada Corp.)

 

NASA first engineered a model of its own after studying the images of the Soviet’s spacecraft. The Americans were stunned at how well it performed. The Russians, apparently, were on to something.
“Eyes were opened,” according to the NASA account.
Eventually, NASA decided to pursue its own program, dubbing it the HL-20, which was going to be used as an escape vehicle for the astronauts aboard the space station. But eventually the agency cancelled the program, citing a lack of money among other reasons.
By the time Mark Sirangelo, who is now the head of Sierra Nevada’s Corp.’s space division, went to see a wooden model of the HL-20 in 2005, it was stashed away in the corner of a NASA hangar, hidden under a tarp that was covered in bird droppings. After sitting in limbo for at least a decade, NASA officials were getting ready to trash it, he said in a recent interview.
“Everything was boxed up,” Sirangelo said.
Still, he was intrigued. It had a robust pedigree of flight testing and analysis, even if the data appeared to be crunched using a handheld calculator. NASA granted Sirangelo access to the program’s data, and he hoped to resurrect what he saw as the next step in the history of the shuttle.
Sierra Nevada Corp. went to work reviving the space plane, and eventually entered the reusable Dream Chaser in NASA’s competition for a spacecraft that would fly astronauts to the space station after the shuttle retired in 2011. It fared well, making to the final round by which NASA had invested mroe than $363 million in the Dream Chaser.
There was a certain poetry to having a miniature shuttle become a serious contender in the race to replace the shuttle. And because Dream Chaser was a plane that could and land on a runway, instead of a capsule carried to Earth under parachutes, as other companies were offering, Sirangelo figured his company had a good chance of winning.
Instead, the bid failed. It “was like a death in the family,” Sirangelo would say at the time. About 100 people would lose their jobs.
So the company pivoted. NASA had launched a new competition for a craft to take cargo, not astronauts, to the space station. The deadline to enter was January 2015, a few months away.
Some people had doubts—“why would we bother,” Sirangelo said. “If you didn’t win the first time, what makes you think you could win the second time.”
Besides, the companies that had held the previous cargo contracts—SpaceX and Dulles-based Orbital ATK—were up and flying, and making their case that they should win again. And this time around, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the two largest defense contractors in the world, were also bidding. Sirangelo knew that his group would have to climb “a bigger mountain from an even deeper hole,” he said.
They would work through the holidays, submit their bid, and then begin the long wait until June, when NASA was expected to make the award.
June would be a good time to get the news, especially if it was bad. Families with kids could finish out the school year, and then have the summer to figure out what to do next. But then NASA pushed back the announcement to July, and then again to September, and then again to November. And then, once more, to January.
“The delays took a toll on everybody,” said Steve Lindsey, the program manager.
Company officials tried to stay optimistic. Even if they lost, they would try to find another customer for the Dream Chaser. A foreign government, perhaps, or companies that would want to fly experiments to space. But if NASA had rejected the vehicle not once, but twice, Sirangelo knew that would be a tough sell, and worried that his staff, loyal though they were, would be forced to head for the exits.
“Would they stay if we didn’t have the NASA seal of approval?” he said.

Decision day

He tried to stay calm by watching the sun rising over the Colorado plains outside his office window. It was shortly after 7 a.m. one Thursday last month. The call would come at 8—though Mark Sirangelo told his staff between 8 and 9 because he didn’t want them knocking down his door in nervous anticipation.

A loss could be a death knell, and Sirangelo, the head of the company’s space division, would be left with a cold reality: “We spent 10 years developing something and it becomes another aerospace story where it doesn’t go anywhere,” he said in a recent interview. “It doesn’t fly.”
At 8:10, the phone rang.
Sirangelo and his leadership team walked into the conference room, where his staff was waiting anxiously, stone-faced, betraying nothing.
“I’m sorry,” Sirangelo began. He stood at the podium, letting the dramatic pause sink in. The room was silent. “But it looks like we’re going to be working together for the next decade.”
As his employees broke out in raucous applause, hugging each other, allowing the relief to set in, Sirangelo marveled at the transformative power of a big government contract win, how “life can change for thousands of people with just one sentence.”

Legacy

In 2005, Sirangelo took a trip to Russia and visited with some of the engineers who worked on the BOR-4. He told them that their invention lived on.
They were stunned, and had no idea that their invention had been resurrected, as the website Ars Technica has reported.
Sirangelo promised that when the Dream Chaser flew, it would carry a list of the names of the Russian engineers along with people at NASA who worked on the HL-20 program.
A couple years later, Sirangelo got a letter from the daughter of one of those engineers, saying that her father had recently died but it was very important to him that his name be on that flight.
When the vehicle flies, he said she told him, it would be as of “a small piece of him would be in space.”

Christian Davenport covers federal contracting for The Post's Financial desk. He joined The Post in 2000 and has served as an editor on the Metro desk and as a reporter covering military affairs. He is the author of "As You Were: To War and Back with the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard."