One clear, sunny day this past May, the residents of Broomfield, Colorado spotted what was, for most of them, an unidentified flying object.
Surrounded by excited, shouting workers in American blue jeans and orange coveralls, an Erickson Aircrane helicopter hoisted the UFO up off its perch of rectangular white styrofoam and carried it in circles around the local airstrip. The workers took notes and pictures, the local news took even more pictures, and the resulting images went viral. That day, the world met Dream Chaser, the small spacecraft that Sierra Nevada Corporation hopes will become NASA's future ride to the International Space Station.
Dream Chaser recently completed its first milestone in the third round of NASA's Commercial Crew development program, CCiCap, and it's set to be dropped from a helicopter for first landing tests some time later this year. It's the only spaceplane on NASA's short list of CCiCap partners; the other two are Apollo-like capsules designed to plummet back to Earth. For those who love it, Dream Chaser inspires enthusiasm because it reminds them of a Space Shuttle, and because it can do things that a capsule can't.
But while the craft itself is new, Dream Chaser's history goes much further back than that spotting over Broomfield. The Dream Chaser is a Cold War product, replete with secret military programs, spy planes, rocket scientists, Russian trawlers, and Air Force test pilots working in the middle of the desert. Fifty years later, this descendant of a secret Soviet spaceplane might finally see its way into orbit.
Distant branches of a family tree
The American branches of the Dream Chaser family tree begin with Dale Reed, a man who loved anything that flew. Reed spent the 1960s doing experiments at what became known as NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center. The small research station was based at Edwards Air Force Base and located by Rogers Dry Lake, smack in the hot, parched middle of Southern California. As a fresh young aeronautical engineer in 1953, Reed by his own account "drove south from Idaho and west across the Nevada desert to the town of Mojave, California, where I made a sharp southeastern turn into the middle of nowhere."
Two years before, NASA Ames researchers had made an important discovery: a blunt-nosed airplane didn't get hot the way a pointy-nosed one did when it reached supersonic speeds, because a pressure wave held the hot air away from the nose. A blunt-nosed spacecraft was therefore more likely to survive atmospheric re-entry.
It was a breakthrough, but an unsatisfying one for an airplane lover, because the blunt capsule shapes Ames researchers began testing didn't fly very well. They fell through the atmosphere and decelerated at about eight times Earth's gravity, a crushing ride for whoever would be inside. Dale Reed decided that a flying spacecraft was a better option, one with the ability to reenter gently and fly to a specific destination.
Reed didn't favor wings, however. Wings are a problem for re-entry vehicles; they burn up easily and they must be strong enough to withstand the force of reentering the atmosphere at over 20,000 miles per hour while somehow not becoming too large a portion of the spacecraft's weight. But Ames had discovered other shapes that would fly, shapes that more closely resembled bathtubs than airplanes.
Reed read the research papers and began to build models of wingless aircraft, crafted out of paper and balsa, and his fellow engineers gathered to watch them fly up and down the Dryden hallways. Eventually, he convinced his superiors to grant him the small team of people and budget necessary to build full-sized aircraft. The group didn't actually have any money for aircraft research; they only had money for building maintenance. So Reed's boss took their initial budget out of that, and arranged collaboration and political cover from Ames, several hours away at Moffett Field.
Reed's group of friends and colleagues slowly proved that by shaping a spacecraft's body to provide lift, and by giving it a blunt nose, they could enable astronauts to fly back from space rather than just falling down from it. The team built and flew many lifting bodies, changing them on the fly as they had new ideas. They crafted each using wood and metal and whatever knowledge they had picked up from the last one, turning out "flying bathtubs and flatirons" on a relatively quick basis. The first lifting body aircraft was built in roughly three months for a little over $200,000 in 2010 dollars.
Some of the test pilots who flew these vehicles, often engineers or physicists, went on to become famous—men like Chuck Yeager, who broke the sound barrier, and Dick Scobee, pilot of the last Challenger mission. In some cases, the aircraft became famous, too. The M2-F2 went on to star in the opening credits of "The Six Million Dollar Man," and a model of the X-24A became a well-used movie prop. Lifting body technology became part of the Space Shuttle and the X-33 spaceplane.
Lifting body research also became a useful way to figure out what the Soviets were doing.
Back in the USSR
The Russian side of the family tree is where surveillance and a "borrowed" design make an entrance. Western powers were the spies in this episode; they lifted the shape of a Russian spaceplane and gave it a new home in NASA Langley's paper-strewn offices and wind tunnels, changing its name several times along the way.
On June 4, 1982, the Soviet Union launched a small spaceplane called the BOR-4 from Kapustin Yar missile test range in Astrakhan Oblast, Russia. BOR-4 wasn't a real spacecraft; it was meant to test the thermal protection tiles of the Soviet space shuttle, Buran. It flew over Russia and came down again in light seas near the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean. A thin layer of clouds covered the sky, but the light remained bright and the Soviets found the craft quickly with a large trawler. They sent a boatload of men to attach a harness and pull it out of the water.
Naturally, when the Soviet Union launched something from a missile test range, other countries became strongly interested. A Royal Australian Air Force P-3 Orion reconnaissance aircraft flew over the BOR-4 splashdown site and took photos of the strangely shaped object. It had tall, inflatable orange cones sticking out of its nose and tail, making it easy to spot in rough seas. It had a scow-shaped nose and small, highly slanted wings.
The Australians weren't sure what to make of it, but they weren't at all shy about buzzing the trawler to take better photos (you can see just how close the Australians came in the video below). The Soviets set off smoke bombs near the spacecraft to prevent the P-3 from getting anything useful, but the wind blew up and the smoke failed to cover much. At the same time, a happy Soviet soldier was getting great video of the Orion P-3. Australian Defense Intelligence immediately sent their pictures to the CIA, while the Soviet soldier turned his film over to his superiors.