Message posted by Peter Merlin on January 31, 2013 at 14:32:13 PST:
I have a certain fondness for the Dream Chaser, both because I like lifting bodies (which can land on a conventional runway) and because of the design's convoluted heritage. Sierra Nevada Corporation designed the Dream Chaser based on NASA Langley Research Center's HL-20 concept that was developed through a series of engineering studies and wind-tunnel model tests in 1990. The funny part is that the Langley engineers had borrowed the vehicle's shape from the Soviet BOR-4, a subscale prototype for the proposed Spiral spaceplane. After cancellation of Spiral, the BOR-4 was flown to test heat shield materials being developed for the Soviet Buran space shuttle. If the Dream Chaser is successful, an essentially Russian design of the Cold War era will be built and launched in America to transport U.S. and Russian astronauts to the International Space Station. If you had told me this 30 years ago, when the first BOR-4 photos were obtained by the RAAF, I would have laughed.
In Reply to: Dream Chaser posted by Gimbal on January 31, 2013 at 2:20:00 PST:
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