Sierra Nevada Corporation's space access vehicle, Dream Chaser, bears some uncanny resemblances with Boeing's 1957 X-20 Dyna-Soar boost glide vehicle. The Dream Chaser is the latest descendant in the family of lifting reentry vehicles, whereas the X-20 was one of the first programs to implement this configuration. Like the Dream Chaser, the X-20 was also competing to be the primary space access capability for the United States of America. The X-20 was canceled in 1963 under political and administrative influences that made Gemini a priority. Now, almost sixty years after the disappointing fate of the X-20, the Dream Chaser faces a similar scenario. Just as the X-20 lost to the Gemini capsule based system, likewise, the Dream Chaser lost against Space-X's and Boeing's capsule designs in the final round of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, a program to ferry astronauts to LEO. In this context, the X-20 presents a data-rich historical case-study which can be studied from the technical, administrative, and political viewpoints resulting in the cancellation of the program. This paper applies a physics-based parametric sizing procedure to the X-20 Dyna-Soar with objective to reverse-engineer certain top-level design and program architecture decisions. Since the Dream Chaser is a direct descendant among the lifting reentry vehicle family lineage due to configuration evolution and operational constraints, the present study attempts to leverage historical lessons with the aim to provide a consistent objective assessment that can help better understand the current scenario faced by Dream Chaser program.
展开▼
