SNC: Free-flight Test a Success Despite Crash Landing

摘要

Despite a crash landing, a full-scale model of Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Dream Chaser - one of three spacecraft vying to take the space shuttle's place as NASA's means of flying astronauts to the international space station - may actually have performed well enough in an Oct. 26 test flight to clear an $8 million development milestone, according to a Sierra Nevada executive. "The milestone was all about the flight worthiness of the vehicle and the data from the flight and the ability for us to autonomously control the flight in the air," Mark Sirangelo, corporate vice president for Sierra Nevada Corp. (SNC) and head of Sierra Nevada Space Systems, told SpaceNews in an Oct. 28 phone interview. "The fact that the landing gear didn't go down once we hit the ground ... was not actually part of the test."