Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Dream Chaser: The Return of the Spaceplane

Episode Date: May 10, 2016

We’re back at Space Symposium for a conversation with SNC’s Mark Sirangelo, leader of that company’s effort to build the Dream Chaser. We’ll also hear a few moments of Bill Nye’s session at the annual gathering as he hosted Bernard Foing and Amy Mainzer.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The return of the space plane, Dream Chaser, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We'll return to Space Symposium this week for a conversation with Mark Serangelo of the Sierra Nevada Corporation, builder of the Dream Chaser that should fly to the International Space Station in 2019. We'll hear a few moments of Bill Nye's appearance at that annual gathering of the space industry with his guests Bernard Foying and Amy Meinzer. And Bruce Betts makes me feel better about missing the transit of Mercury in our What's Up segment.

We start with Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, we're just a few days late getting to your May What's Up Around the Solar System report this week. Still plenty of time to enjoy what's happening this month. Let's start with Venus and an image of it that was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Yeah, it's really nice to see Akatsuki getting going on its science mission finally after a couple of year delay and an extra several trips around the sun.

This photo is of the night side of Venus, but Venus is a pretty hot place. And so if you look at it in near-infrared wavelengths, you can see surface features or the lower atmosphere glowing with warm infrared energy. And then sometimes upper atmosphere clouds block some of that warmth. So what we're looking at here is a photo of Venus with swirling clouds, where the more opaque clouds are backlit by glowing hot air underneath. And just one little taste of what's to come from this mission. We should get tons and tons of images like this to be able to see Venus's clouds moving over time. Wow, that'll be spectacular, won't it? On to the red planet. I'll just mention briefly that anybody who looks at your May update, which

went up on our website at planetary.org on May 3rd, should take the time to click through to a couple of beautiful images from that high-rise camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. But without going into what's in orbit any further, we haven't talked about Opportunity in a long time. Yeah, Opportunity has been working hard within the limits of its remaining capabilities to explore this area's Marathon Valley, climbing around rocks and getting gorgeous views and really doing science on these ancient clay minerals that it's been exploring for a while. They've done a little mini walkabout to see what kinds of rocks are in the offing for some in situ work. And they're settling down to do that in situ work now.

And what is the health of that little rover? Well, it's down a couple instruments, but it's still quite capable of driving around. It's generating very good power. Being at a high elevation on a crater rim means there's a good breeze to keep dust from settling too much. And so it's got plenty of power to work with and still lots of science left in the little rover. Finally, out to Pluto and New Horizons, which of course is long past Pluto and Charon now. But there's big stuff coming up. We're going to see some new images released, hopefully soon. Yeah, that's right. So the spacecraft is still returning data from Pluto. It's going to take all the rest of this year to get new images down.

And in the meantime, the scientists are preparing their first public release of the science quality data so that other scientists can get their hands on it. I understand that the release has been submitted to NASA's planetary data system. So now I'm just waiting to see that release any day now. There is so much more happening up and around our solar system. You can read about it in Emily's May 3rd entry at planetary.org. Thanks very much, Emily. Thank you, Matt. As always, she is our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society,

and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. We began our reporting from the Space Foundation Space Symposium last week. We return now to that huge gathering in Colorado Springs. Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye hosted one of the few science-focused sessions at the meeting when he brought Bernard Foying and Amy Meinzer on stage. We heard from Bernard last week. He's the European Space Agency's chief scientist. Amy has been our guest many times. She's the JPL researcher who heads the NEOWISE near-Earth object detection mission, among other jobs. In this tiny excerpt from their discussion, Bill brings up one of his favorite topics. So everybody, just keep in mind that the

planetary science line item in the NASA budget is one and a half billion dollars. And I'm proud to say at the Planetary Science, we have worked hard to get that upped a little bit, over one and a half billion. But all of these missions, all of these pictures, if we combine a half million, half billion from ESA, one and a half from NASA, it's two billion dollars. That's half billion from ESA, but we also rely a lot on the contribution from member states. Twenty-two countries. Yeah, twenty-two countries, and we have also international cooperation with U.S. and other So what I'm saying is it's very inexpensive to make these discoveries that change the

way we think about the cosmos and our place within it. And I claim again, if we were to discover life on another world, everybody would feel differently about being on Earth. Yes, indeed. I think that's right. Well, I mean, that's one of my favorite things about this is basically every day is more interesting and cooler than the next. It's a job you just fall in love with every day a little more. I mean, what's not to like? Tell us how you really feel. I love it.

Amy Meinzer, Bernard Foying, and Bill Nye talking space science at Space Symposium. Space Symposium is mostly a place to get business done, and much of that business happens on the exhibit floor. One of the corporate booths belonged to the Sierra Nevada Corporation, and attracting lots of attention in that booth was a small model of a craft called Dream Chaser. If it makes you think of a mini-me version of the space shuttle, you're pretty much dead on. You'll hear Mark Serangelo refer to it as a lifting body, a narrow dynamic approach that doesn't much distinguish between wing and fuselage. Mark was president and CEO of SpaceDev before it was acquired by SNC, becoming its space systems

division, which he leads. We sat down at a table in the company's small conference room as the exhibit hall buzzed with activity around us. Welcome to Planetary Radio. This is a conversation that is long overdue, Mark Sirangelo. It certainly is, and we've been fans for quite a long time, and I'm really thrilled to be able to spend some time with you and talk about what we're doing and really be more engaged with you and all the people that are involved with Planetary Society. It's been a wonderful thing to see how it's grown and developed. Well, thank you for that. I get the press releases from SMC, so I know that this company is up to many, many things, but it's the dream chaser that my boss, among others, can't stop talking about. It's pretty inspiring just to look

at. Well, thank you. And those are wonderful words when you hear that people can't stop talking about it. It's one of those things. It is certainly a technical achievement and we're really proud of the win that we've had with NASA. But I think from the very beginning, I've always had this feeling that people come up to me and say, this looks like it should fly. It's a vehicle that looks like it should be our next step in space. And sometimes in the very low moments, we used to look back on those comments and say, you know, that's why we're

doing this, because it does inspire people. It does make people feel like this is something that's moving us forward. And we're very happy to be able to be NASA's partner in the long term now for this. Would you mention how that fairly recent development after what may have been what you call the low times, you're back in business now with NASA? We are. And you know, there's two ways you can go when you hit something hard. And I know a lot of people that may be listening to this in their careers, in their lives, or their jobs, they look at something that's difficult. And we certainly had the same thing many years ago. Ten years ago, we started down the road of saying we're going to build a replacement for the space shuttle. And a lot

of people laughed at us back then because we were a very small company and how people said, how could you do this in a garage in San Diego? But yet there was a thought that there was a way to make this happen. And part of why I believe that we've been successful, we've had so many people helping us along the way who believe in this. And it culminated this January with the announcement that NASA has chosen us to be a long-term partner to deliver cargo, critical cargo, up and down to the space station, at least through probably the end of the next decade. So Dream Chaser will be built. It will be built in multiple versions. And we'll get to fly here soon.

Say something about the heritage of the design of this spacecraft. A lot of us who are involved in the entrepreneurial space industry, and I was at the beginning of the Commercial Space Flight Federation when we formed it, people look at us and say, you know, you're doing something new and different. I don't really believe on that. What I believe is that we're carrying a torch from a lot of people who went before us. Immediately, 135 shuttle flights and tens of thousands of people who worked on that program, half of my team came from the shuttle program. And what we look at and say, we're the next generation of what shuttle did.

And it paved the way for many, many of these achievements. But even before that, our program started its life as a NASA program called the HL-20 in the 80s and 90s, and it was really designed to look at how could a space plane or a lifting body fly, and its mission was to be the crew rescue vehicle for the space station. They worked on it for 10 years, and while it didn't continue for a variety of reasons, we picked up that data, we picked up the information from the space shuttle. We picked up a lot of people. I've been fortunate to have mentors from going back to people from the Mercury program.

And we took all that and said, how can we make this move forward? How can we use this to bring something new and different to our country and to the space industry? And fortunately, we've been able to do that. What are the advantages of being able to land horizontally like the space shuttle? Well, there's a number of things to start with. We take up a significant amount of cargo. It's over 5,000 kilograms. And that is, I think, going to really help NASA be able to do things in a different way. The space station is not an observatory. It's a laboratory. It's meant to do things. And it's meant to do things that could infect all of us on Earth.

Medical research, pharmaceutical research, plant growth experiments. Little of that's going to matter if we can't bring it home, and bring it home properly. So one of the big things that we looked at is that our vehicle is capable of taking up a lot of cargo to the station. It's also a self-controlled environment, so it can take up biological cargo. It can take up many things in a way that's fairly benign and very quick. Once we get to the space station, we come home in six to ten hours to a runway, and we can land on virtually any commercial runway that an A320 or a 737 can land on. Obviously, we have to get permissions and do that, but it changes the whole scope of what can be done. All of a sudden experiments that are very sensitive,

that are done up there, that could really lead to the next big thing that's discovered, are able to come home in an environment that's quick to a runway and almost more importantly at less than 2 Gs. We come in at 1.6 Gs. And that's about a third of what most capsules come home at. And do that anywhere in the world with an adequate runway? We can, and we actually have. And it's been fascinating because spaceports and commercial airports around the world have been coming to us to say, is this something you can do?

And can you help us really look at how we can become a spaceport or how we can accommodate a Dream Chaser landing. And we have worked with Ellington Field in Houston, and they have now got their spaceport license using our data. We just had a big event in Huntsville, Alabama, who's looking seriously at being able to do this. And there are actually 10 other cities and spaceports being able to make that happen. So yes, we can come home and land. And as interesting, we fit into a standard cargo plane and we can take that vehicle once it lands and bring it home without needing a specialized

747 like the shuttle did. And I think also one of the things that really has attracted people is that we've engineered out any hazardous material from the vehicle. The propellants we use are standard non-toxic propellants. We don't go out promoting it as a green vehicle, but essentially we've been able to reduce the footprint. That also makes it safer, but it also allows us to go right up to the vehicle when we land and take the experiments off, unlike the shuttle and other spacecraft where you have to wait a while before you can go near them. That's Mark Serangelo of SNC. We'll talk more about the Dream Chaser in a minute. This is Planetary Radio.

This is Robert Picardo. I've been a member of the Planetary Society since my Star Trek Voyager days. You may have even heard me on several episodes of Planetary Radio. Now I'm proud to be the newest member of the Board of Directors. Now I'm proud to be the newest member of the Board of Directors. I'll be able to do even more to help the Society achieve its goals for space exploration across our solar system and beyond. You can join me in this exciting quest. The journey starts at planetary.org.

I'll see you there. Do you know what your favorite presidential candidate thinks about space exploration? Hi, I'm Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy. You can learn that answer, and what all the other candidates think, at planetary.org slash election2016. You know what? We could use your help. If you find anything we've missed, you can let us know. It's all at planetary.org slash election2016. Thank you. Welcome back to Planetary Radio.

I'm Matt Kaplan. We're talking with Sierra Nevada Corporation Vice President Mark Serangelo. He heads the company's space systems operation, which is building the Dream Chaser, a space plane with a heritage that includes the space shuttle, but with all the advantages that 35 years of progress bring to the concept of a reusable space plane. How many missions do you hope a typical Dream Chaser vehicle will be able to make? And this question of reusability, which some of your competitors believe in very strongly and others are sort of poo-pooing. Right, and I think the world is being divided into reusability of launch systems,

and in our case, the reusability of our spaceship. We think we're going to have pretty significant reusability. Even with all its complexity, the shuttle got an average of 27 missions, and shuttle Discovery got 39 missions, and people forget that. We're designing our vehicle, we expect to have at least a minimum of 15 or 20 missions off of each vehicle, probably a lot more, but that's where we're starting from. In the history of capsules, going back to the very first capsule of 700 or 800 or so missions, there has never been a capsule that's gone back up to space. What we're looking at is a balanced space fleet where we have capsules that are purposed and do good things, like Orion is a capsule that can do things beyond low Earth orbit.

That is not necessarily the best footprint for what happens around low Earth orbit. Dream Chaser won't go beyond Earth. That's not its mission. But it can do the mission around Earth very, very well. As you said, your current task assigned by NASA, your contract with NASA, is for cargo. But of course, Dream Chaser was also designed to carry humans up to orbit and back. Is that still something that you're looking forward to? Yes, it is. And we're very fortunate that the contract with NASA is going to call for at least

six missions, probably a lot more over time. And it enables us to develop the autonomous version of Dream Chaser. And in some interesting ways, that actually will make the future crew variant a lot more useful because one of the things we will do is have fully autonomous flight software on the vehicle. It's not ground controlled. So this software essentially is the pilot of the vehicle. It's not ground controlled. So this software essentially is the pilot of the vehicle. And when we do go to a human crewed vehicle, we can have a pilot, but we can have a very good backup in the event something happens to the pilot, or maybe even someday have a vehicle

that doesn't have a formal pilot and is used autonomously. But what we did was we took a method very similar to the commercial airplane industry and said we're going to create essentially a standard frame from which we can go do many variants. So a 747 can take people, it can take cargo, it can be used for scientific experiments, as we've seen in Sofia. We can do many things from the same basic platform, and we're doing the same thing. So a standard Dream Chaser design can be fully

autonomous cargo, it can have a crewed variant, it can be used for servicing, which we think is a big opportunity where we might be able to go up and fix satellites or go up to the Hubble telescope and repair that again. And we can do that because we also are able to have an airlock in the vehicle. So we can have a crewed vehicle going out to do missions, we can do EVAs out of the vehicle, or we can design it as an autonomous vehicle that can stay in orbit for well over a year doing this kind of work. What's the current status? It's pretty exciting. For someone who loves hardware, we've been in business now over 25 years in the space world, and we just passed our 450th mission.

Just actually yesterday when the Bigelow module beam attached to the space station, it did so using our berthing adapter that we built, as do all the Cygnus spacecraft from orbital. So it's a fun thing to be able to see that happen, so we were very proud of that. The status is that we have built a full flight test vehicle. The equivalent for the shuttle would be Enterprise, which flew five times and never went to space. Now sits on the carrier in New York Harbor. We've built our version of Enterprise that started to fly. It's now going into a second phase of flight test, which will happen later this year.

And that's a means we're going to go higher, we're going to go faster. we're actually going to test a whole group of new electronics, as well as the new flight software that will take us to orbit. So we're seeing real flying going on. At the same time, we've started the build of the orbital fleet, which is being done with a number of partners. We have over 30 partners around the world on this program. Lockheed Martin is building the physical structure of the vehicle for us using the same facilities that are used for Orion, actually. So we're finding ways to co-share some of the infrastructure that's out there. And so the vehicle fleet is being built out. And then the third part of this is all the activities that are necessary for us to go

and dock and work or berth with the space station are being developed. So we have three major paths of development happening. Tough question to ask, but when do you think we might first see one of these ships on the tip of a booster getting ready to head for orbit? The NASA contract calls for us to start flying in 2019, and that's what we're targeting as our goal. And we think we'll have our fleet ready to be able to do that. Our launch platform to start with is the Atlas V, and that's a rocket that's had now well over 60 flights, and United Launch Alliance has done a terrific job in keeping that program moving forward.

So we have the rocket, the vehicle's under development and actual build right now, and all the support activities necessary to make the flight are being developed. So it's pretty exciting. It's getting to be really quite real for us. Last question. You know how there are some human created devices? I've had discussions about this with engineers, like some bridges, the DC-3 airplane that just somehow speak to you. They're functional but in that functionality they're also beautiful. Dream Chaser strikes me that way. It strikes me that way too. I've been a pilot since I was a teenager and you can look at an airplane sometimes and see that it should fly and it looks just like what it should be and I think we've always felt that

about Dream Chaser and it's interesting I've traveled the world talking and it looks just like what it should be. And I think we've always felt that about Dream Chaser. And it's interesting, I've traveled the world talking, and it is something that invokes the same emotion in every country and in every audience, young and old, that I've spoken to. We're quite fortunate to have a number of international partners on board, the European Space Agency, the German DLR Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, JAXA. And they all, I think, see the same thing in this. They've been terrific partners. We are looking at being agnostic so we

can fly around the world. And because we own the vehicle and they're providing a service, it's a change of philosophy. And what we're seeing is that it's something that the world can rally around. And it's inspirational, in my view. And really, isn't that what it's about? I was inspired, and my peers have been inspired to get into space by things that happened before us. And if maybe we can leave that to spark that next generation to do things better than I can do, then I think we've accomplished our purpose. Best of luck with Dream Chaser, Mark. I cannot wait to see it headed into orbit and docked to the International Space Station. Well, thank you very much.

And to all your listeners, I think this is the first step of what we're trying to do. Although what we do is around low-Earth orbit, we believe it's going to enable true research of all the planets. Because in order to get there, we're going to need to be able to build and support things from our orbit to be able to take that next step, in my view. And Dream Chaser, we hope to be a part of that. And I know many of your listeners just wholly believe in our ability to go out and explore, and we feel we're going to be the next step in that. So everyone should take heart and smile because the change is coming.

It's been a terrific year in space, and I think we're going to continue to see that. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. We are joined by the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. He is Bruce Betts. And I just want to say how very disappointed I am. I was all set to watch the transit this morning, and it's totally overcast here near the beach in Southern California. Sorry, I scheduled the transit, but you forgot to ask me to schedule your weather. Come on, it's supposed to be a package deal.

It's been overcast here, but there's some fine stuff online that you can watch, including NASA's SDO Observatory, which doesn't have to worry about clouds. It's got beautiful video of it crossing the sun. All right. I don't want to hear any more about transits until the next one. I'm not sure I can do that, but I can at least do that today. What else is going on? So here, I can give you something that you'll have lots of nights to choose from, and that's Mars getting brighter, brighter.

Opposition, opposite side of the Earth from the sun on the 22nd. That's actually slightly a different time than the closest approach, which is about the 30th of this month of May. And so for the next couple months, next few weeks, Mars being exceptionally bright, and you can pull out your telescope and maybe be able to see a little bit in terms of surface features. That's coming up in the east in the early evening. Jupiter already high in the early evening in the south. And of course, you can check that out all the time. And I did. And it was beautiful. That was the test of the telescope.

And boy, it was gorgeous Saturday evening. Well, congratulations. Thank you. The sky delivers. Now and then. Also near Mars, I mentioned Saturn looking yellowish and now significantly dimmer because Mars is brightening. And also the star Antares, which looks reddish, forms a triangle with the other two. Antares also much dimmer than Mars right now. We move on to this week in space history. It was 1973 that the Skylab space station was launched. Still a heck of a space station that was. Very, very cool.

We move on, and I take it you've got some more music to lead us into the next segment. Yes, the Possum Kingdom Ramblers. They had several of these for us. Here's another one of their random space fact intros. Random Space

Fact. Very entertaining as well. Well, that's always cool. It's stellar, in fact. I got a stellar fact. More massive stars have shorter lifetimes, as determined by their main sequence pre-end phase duration, compared to less massive stars.

So the Sun, a fairly average mass star, will do its standard fusion thing for more than 10 billion years. 10 billion years. Whereas much more massive stars can have lifetimes measured in millions of years. And it works at the other end of the spectrum too. It holds up this relationship as we heard from Jill Tarter about red dwarfs. It does indeed. They have lifetimes of tens of billions of years or will eventually.

We're ready for the contest. We asked you, what was the first recorded observation of a transit of Mercury across the sun and by whom? How did we do? Sorry, I had to mention transit again. Yeah, that didn't last long, did it? We did quite well. Good response to this. A lot of people who wanted to get their hands on those Tyler Norgren posters and a 200-point itelescope.net account.

Here's the person that Random.org picked, and he has not won in nearly four years. Elias Lostrum. Elias who lives in Dionysos, Greece. He says the first observation of a transit of Mercury was on November 7, 1631 by Pierre Gassendi. That is correct. Excellent. Elias, we are going to send you those posters and we'll get you set up with an itelescope.net account.

As always, we had some other terrific entries. John Gallant mentioned that this was based on a prediction by Johannes Kepler, who had died just a year before. In fact, several people mentioned that Kepler made the prediction, which Gassendi made good on. There were also people who pointed to other possibilities, even though they said Gassendi is the accepted first observer. Among them were Jordan Louis and Melody Chan, who talked about Ibn Bajjah in the 12th century, made a report at the right time, I guess, that may very well have been transit across the surface of the sun by the planet Mercury. Andrew Kerr in Bethesda, Maryland, mentioned that Gassendi had a lot of other accomplishments. Did you know that he also measured the speed of sound? I did not know that.

Yes, and he showed that it was invariant, didn't matter what the pitch of the sound was. Not bad for 1631. Finally, this from Martin Hajavsky in Houston, Texas. Gibbon, the great historian, called Gassendi, quoting here, the greatest philosopher among literary men and the greatest literary man among philosophers. So, no, wait for it, wait for it. In astronomical terms, Pierre was thus a true Gassendi giant. I'm so glad we squeezed that in

alright we can move on speaking of stars but not transits approximately how much more massive is the star Sirius A compared to the sun Sirius A which also has a dimmer companion white dwarf is the brightest star in the sky how much more massive is it than the sun? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest.

And you have until Tuesday, May 17th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer this time. And somebody will be chosen by random.org. And if that person has the right answer, they're going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid. No, I've got to do that. I don't like it. Rubber asteroid, that's much better. And an itelescope.net account. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about iron.

Thank you, and good night. He could be talking about the core of our planet. He could be talking about a later stage in a large star's life. I think he's reminding me that my shirt is wrinkled. That's Bruce Betts. He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its smooth-gliding members. Josh Doyle created our theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan.

Clear skies.