Spaceport Huntsville: Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser Cleared to Land at Alabama Airport
WASHINGTON (FAA PR) — The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is issuing a license to the Huntsville-Madison Airport Authority in Alabama to operate the Huntsville International Airport (HSV) as a commercial space reentry site.
The license permits the airport to offer its site for Sierra Space Dream Chaser vehicles returning to Earth from future NASA resupply missions to the International Space Station. The Reentry Site Operator License is valid for five years.
The FAA license evaluation process involved environmental and safety reviews. In addition, the FAA will work with the airport to develop the necessary notifications and other procedures for safely and efficiently integrating commercial space reentries into its operations.
The FAA is also issuing the Final Environmental Assessment and a Finding of No Significant Impact/Record of Decision for the Authority’s reentry site license. These same final environmental documents also cover the related, but separate Sierra Space proposal to conduct up to eight reentry operations at the airport from 2023 to 2027. To view these documents and other project information, click here.
Sierra Space, or any other commercial space vehicle operator, cannot conduct reentry operations at the airport until it obtains a Vehicle Operator License from the FAA.
The Huntsville Reentry Site is the 14th FAA-licensed commercial spaceport. To view a map of all U.S. spaceports, click here.
48 responses to “Spaceport Huntsville: Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser Cleared to Land at Alabama Airport”
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It will be interesting to see how it will integrate with the existing flights coming in and out of Huntsville. Initially they will probably stop all arrivals and departures for an hour or so because it’s all new. But realistically that’s not really necessary because Dream Chaser will be nowhere near the approach path airliners use as it comes in much steeper, it probably won’t converge onto the normal approach glideslope until probably the last 1,000 feet or so. I would guess once they have had a few landings and get comfortable with it they could keep planes landing up to five minutes ahead of Dream Chaser’s arrival. An airliner five minutes out will be several miles away from the airport and in no danger of colliding with Dream Chaser.
Only problem I can envision is the extremely unlikely event that an aircraft landing or taking off prior to Dream Chaser’s arrival crashes or is otherwise disabled on the runway and they can’t clear it out of the way in time. But Huntsville has a parallel runway so Dream Chaser could simply use the other runway. However I would guess they have some minimum amount of time required to change runways, so that might set the limit on when they shut down the runway that Dream Chaser will be using. In the meantime arriving and departing aircraft can use the other runway.
After Dream Chaser lands the runway that it uses will be tied up briefly until they are able to tow it onto a taxiway, which I’m guessing could be done pretty quickly. As far as I know Dream Chaser doesn’t have any toxic propellants so the ground team should be able to approach it immediately after landing and get the tow bar connected.
Then again if traffic at Huntsville is light and can be handled with one runway then Sierra can take their time with all of this.
Dream Chaser has no “go-around” capability, which means every landing is an emergency landing which will require emergency crews at the runway and many other measures. It will in no way be anything like a commercial aircraft landing and portraying it as such is completely deceptive. The Spaceplane concept failed decades ago and it is now quite obvious that Phil Bono was correct back in the early 60’s that VTVL is the way to operate reusable space launch vehicles and stages.
But….there is a sucker born every minute. Just look at Starlink.
The field is filled with pilots who love wings. I have on the order of over a thousand dead stick landings. They’re no big deal. When the vehicle is made for it and the approach is made properly it’s the most natural thing to do.
LOL……it’s the ONLY thing to do. You think it is “no big deal.” Of course you don’t because you are completely unbiased and have no interest in this at all. You are just an impartial observer.
And….what does that mean, “pilots who love wings”? The TV show?
You make so much stuff up Andrew. I would not get in a plane with you.
“Our work ethic needs a reset. Russians and Americans have some disturbing parallels where they expect to be served. Keeping with current events, Russians are used to be served by Ukrainians, and Americans expect to be served by immigrants and captive Asians. The American Left has the most to change on this front. As they put forward a whole set of “you are owed the work of others” worldviews. The American Left needs to find a work ethic to run in parallel with its expectation narrative.“
Hummmm … guess who woke up grumpy this AM.
First point about landings. Dude, I’m a glider pilot. The vast majority of my landings are deadstick, bias has nothing to do with it. It’s based on experience. If you want to call direct experience something that creates a bias, okay fine, I’m biased, but not out of ignorance or a sense of aesthetic taste.
“Pilots love wings.”. It means what it says, we view them as the best tool of the trade when it comes to flying. They give you options, control, and time aloft more than any other tool. Spacecraft with wings keep showing up on design room floors because so many pilots who use them are in the design loop when it comes to spacecraft.
I loved your point about that old cable TV show. I loved it when I was a kid. And I’m getting the vibe that you’re probably a Cable TV expert in spaceflight…….. Okay, your opinions are your own.
Yes, it is really a trade off. Wings are good if they are able to survive re-entry. But are a weak point as the Columbia accident showed. Lifting bodies are basically a compromise on re-entry safety versus a controlled landing.
In other words, if it ain’t spacex, it ain’t no good.
Why don’t you just say that?
No, both Blue Origin and Virgin Orbit are going good as well, they just don’t launch as often.
Elon Musk is focused on Mars, which is mostly a dead end destination, so I disagree on that. But in his quest SpaceX is making access to Earth orbit routine and has the potential to do so for the Moon, which is why I wish him well.
Based on past experience, I am going to assume you are lying.
Have a great day!
The Shuttle problem was more of a design issue that put the wings, and in fact the entire TPS at risk. Combined with a lack of urgency dealing with the foam problems because of the “we have survived it until now” philosophy, similar to Challenger. It was very telling when apparently to a person the Shuttle engineers and managers were surprised at the results when a piece of foam was fired at high speed at a piece of RCC. They were previously of the opinion that foam was not capable of doing that type of damage, thus it had never been tested.
The main problems with wings is the extra weight that has to be carried into orbit. And it makes it hard to integrate onto a rocket, unless it’s small like Dream Chaser and X-37 and can fit inside a payload fairing. There are other drawbacks, but there are also many big advantages. And IMHO it’s safer than propulsive landing.
One thing I would like to explore sometime is a lenticular lifting body with toroidal tanks as the main structure. Enter like a fluffy capsule and transition to horizontal flight for cross range and landings.
Complicated set of trades that would probably stop it in the concept phase. Fascinating to me though.
That might be a good design for cargo from space being delivered to Earth from orbit or beyond. It would be better than just dropping capsules into the ocean since you have control over the landing point, most likely a dry lakebed to eliminate the need for landing gear. It should be easy to manufacture in space from lunar materials like Titanium and would be recycled after landing.
The concept that fascinates me would be as a reusable vehicle. A 40 foot lens with an outer toroid tank with a 3 foot minor diameter. holding about 800 cubic feet of fuel. Inner toroid tank with minor of 4.5 feet holding oxidizer leaving 25 foot diameter for people, spacecraft systems, and cargo. Fascinates me is not code for somebody else should spend resources on it.
Problems I am aware of include controllability with lifting body history adding a lot of aero surfaces to the point that it might as well have been body and wings in some cases. Low aspect ratio “wing” has steep glide characteristics. One reference had toroid tanks with similar mass per volume as cylinders, yet a friend in the business told me about people not realizing this in practice.
Your “vibe” is low cognition “Dude.”
And branding someone “grumpy” or “angry” or a dozen other emotional states is a low tactic favored by that most creepy bunch of internet garbage people; the spacex fanboys.
I am not grumpy, just happy to show an intelligent view exists to anyone interested in space that reads these comments.
Spacecraft with wings in a vacuum are a contradiction in terms, were never a good idea, and continue on as a distinctly BAD idea. A capsule with an escape tower and parachute landing was selected from the beginning because it was the only concept that made any sense. Unfortunately, the bias for “pilots love wings” had to rear its ugly head and continues to do so, and here we are.
And I never watched “that old cable TV show.” I knew it existed, but had better things to do. There is a lesson for you there.
What’s your problem? Are you socially retarded? Look at the string of your replies. According to you, you should be the only one talking here. Are you Gary Church?
He is a Gary Church sock puppet
Another disgusting troll from the Musk Cult. Blowing their dog whistle like true free speech absolutists. The garbage people of the internet.
Musk is headed for a series of disasters that will likely see him lose his companies. Starlink and the Shiny will never be realized and spacex will continue on as a satellite launch company under new management. Something that should have happened long ago. The sooner celebrinut ends his reign as a cult leader the better. His legion of trolls are the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration in regards to public support. Nobody can stand them. The Trumpists of space.
What happened to, “your opinions are your own”?
The vicious creeps in the spacex fan club usually show their true colors eventually. All I have to do is keep disagreeing and giving them back the garbage they hand me. Good luck with your Spaceplane.
Spaceflight hating Ahole with Gary Church being one of the early screen names. Likes to cause as much problem as possible but too stupid to put together a coherent argument. Delusions of adequacy. Some indications of it being a trolling regular with no intentions solving any problems.
The dog whistle has been blown. Come on and join the pile creeps!
The lowest most toxic human garbage on the internet: the spacex fanboys.
If I have a choice between wings and a parachute, I’ll choose wings. If it’s a matter of go or no go, I’ll take what’s available.
Class C can get pretty busy. The high fee paying customers are going to tire of having to run their schedules around this. I don’t think this would work in Class B airspace.
They will be in class C airspace for what two minutes maybe? And it will be known ahead of time to the minute when they will be there and the exact path they will be on, with the deorbit burn providing about an hour’s notice whether they will be coming at that time or not. Same with class A airspace, the FAA summary says they will operate below 60,000 feet for about three to four minutes.
I agree they will probably not go into class B airports, but there are plenty of class C airports. At Huntsville they will be using the 10,000 foot runway, leaving the 12,800 foot runway available for other aircraft.
Nevertheless I expect the margins and closures will be wider than might technically be necessary, so there will likely be some inconvenience, but it’s only going to be a couple of times a year.
Yes it’s not going to be an issue until there are several flights a year. It’ll be hard to control arrival times because of the restrictions of the orbital mechanics. All your points are valid, but I suspect the tower will want the pattern clear. So while the arrival time from crossing into class C to landing will be short, getting all the aircraft out of approach, departure, and runway patterns will take longer. Not only that, I’ll be they’ll want all taxi ways cleared as well. To give themselves margin, I’ll bet they shut everything down for an hour, to give themselves time to clear out the traffic and taxiways. There will be an arrival that will come in at prime time and its going to step on everything.
I don’t doubt the first several times it will be as you described, since it’s all new, and also a very different situation and flight profile than they are used to.
Not sure what you mean about it being hard to control arrival times, maybe you are referring to when they have to skip a landing opportunity due to weather and postpone until the next one. I agree that would create a complication as far as NOTAM’s, but that only affects the uncontrolled airspace in the area that Dream Chaser will be flying through between Class A and Class C. For those areas they would need to put out NOTAM’s ahead of time for each possible landing opportunity. But because of the steep glide angle and the inflexible approach path used by Dream Chaser the restricted area should be pretty small.
I still don’t think once this gets more commonplace that it’s necessary to clear all of the arrival and departure patterns. I’m not saying they will use normal aircraft spacing, but this will be a predictable, precise, very quick and brief entry into the class C airspace, with all of it taking place very close to the airport due to the steep glide path. I don’t know the actual glide ratio but in a drop test from 12,000 feet it glided 16,000 feet horizontally, that’s pretty steep. This thing is practically going to drop in. Since the tower and control centers will know the exact arrival time, and I’m sure receiving updates as it gets closer, I don’t think controllers will have a problem keeping an airliner on it’s normal approach say 20 miles out while Dream Chaser drops in.
Again, starting off this will all be new and they will probably close both runways and put all arriving aircraft into holding patterns 40 miles away from the airport. But if this eventually becomes more common and everyone gets used to it, I think they will be able to integrate this into existing operations fairly smoothly.
It is interesting that in February of 1954, “Rocky Jones, Space Ranger” first aired, and one might wonder if Phil Bono, recognized as the father of the VTVL concept, was inspired in any way by it. Destination Moon (1950) also used VTVL, and even Frau im Mond in 1929 was VTVL.
Why keep trying to make Spacecraft into airplanes? Because it seems more like a commercial jet that everyone is familiar with. It seems more…practical. The reality it is the opposite of course.
First, a capsule design will reenter as a self-stabilizing shape that needs no controlling forces. It just does not get any better than that. Once it enters the outer atmosphere in the proper reentry corridor then there is very little that can go wrong.
Second, A traditional capsule design has the minimum amount of mass and this allows an escape tower to accelerate the capsule away from a disintegrating launch vehicle with phenomenal acceleration. This gives the crew the greatest chance of survival in the event of a pad, lift-off, max-q, or staging anomaly. And this is why it is almost impossible to improve upon the capsule/escape tower concept.
Third, whether landing in the ocean or some steppe environment, the simple parachute or parachute/braking-rocket system is going to land the crew at a very low velocity and with very little requirement for any kind of precision touchdown.
Spaceplanes are the opposite of all of that.
The problem with VTVL is not being able to see the ground when landing. Although landers like Surveyor were successful in the 1960’s it wasn’t really solved for high gravity rockets until SpaceX used its software expertise on Falcon 9R.
No….not a problem. The problem was you figuring out some way to reply to me with a spacex advertisement. You solved it but I have to say that I do not advertise for spacex in that way and at every opportunity tell people that the company and it’s bizarro founder are the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration, and has set humankind back decades. And the damage is accumulating. The sooner that billionaire-celebrity-nutcase crashes and burns the better for all of us.
Except, that like it or not, SpaceX has made VTVL routine for the Falcon 9. Blue Origin has made it routine as well for the much smaller New Shepard rocket. Both took an idea from science fiction and made it work whereas NASA never followed up on the promise of the DC-XA, instead going with the failed X-33 lifting body and X-34 winged designs, neither of which flew.
Except, that like it or not, NASA did prove the VTVL concept was practical.
Not SpaceX. Most of the innovation they claim came from others.
Rocket jesus and his minions would take credit for creating the universe if they could.
The only other rocket that accomplished it on Earth was the DC-X/DC-XA, funded by DoD and NASA, which I cheered on as well. It accomplished it 11 times before human error resulted in a landing leg failure that destroyed it.
DEBUNKING MUSK – TED Talk 2022
This is on YouTube right NOW! You should watch it.
Every time a spacex fanboy tries to use replies to my comments to advertise for their cult I am going to try and post this stuff from now on.
Folks often fear change and the future. That is why folks also “debunked” Robert Stephenson, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford, etc. But they pull humanity out of poverty and created today’s world. I imagine few folks would want to return to the world of the early 1800’s.
Apparently the Wright brothers should have sued Boeing over the 747.
Actually they did sue Glenn Curtiss for copying some of their design and refusing to pay a license fee. The case had merit and they eventually won, but sadly the time and money spent derailed their progress, the stress likely contributing to Wilbur’s early death at age 45 and Orville selling the company shortly afterwards.
It is my opinion that by trying to control too many things, the Wrights became a footnote rather than the main focus of technical flight. It may be that if they had remained more focused on their technology that their legal cases, they would have been far more influential long term.
My comment above was about the concept that someone has an idea once and everybody else just rides. There are millions of small to large ideas that have contributed to aviation and no one has them all. No one has the last word either as there is another concept following each existing one. Same with Spaceflight. Elon is THE major player right now, with a fair chance he will be one of many when viewed historically.
Yep, the innovators end up eventually being behind the curve in technology, some sooner than others. The key thread with those that were listed was not that those individuals invented the technology by themselves, but through trial and error experiments made it practical to use, triggering rounds of iterative progress to move it forward. Some became very wealthy while others just gained fame.
BTW SpaceX just launched another batch of Starlink satellites, this time from the Cape, with one more launch to go before Starliner gets the range for its test flight.
“Folks” fear bizarro super-wealthy megalomaniacs wrecking the planet and screwing everything up for our children’s children. Those cheering on the super-rich are the enablers, the sycophants, the worst of the worst that lie and misrepresent to promote their cult leader. You know all about that.
You “imagine” that anyone criticizing your cult of personality celebrity must want to return to the 1800’s? The Musk worshipers are so completely deluded they are right there with the Trumpists and Qanon. Pathetic.
Well, a lot of Greenies say they want to. I think few of them would like actually doing so as there is nothing to prevent people of this odd persuasion from becoming secular Amish right now, yet none do.
As much as I love my state…I have to do this:
Dream Chaser rolls on the runway to the theme of the Six Million Dollar Man…
“yeah, we can rebuild ‘em”
spits chaw’
I’m sorry…I had to
It would be a nice touch to make Lee Majors a Guest of Honor at the first landing – assuming he’s still around by then.
Or Ben Browder from the series Farscape.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
It is not possible to have one without the other. As for their wealth, it rarely lasts more than a generation with most of it going to charitable foundations that continue enabling human progress by providing stable long term funding to projects that are worthwhile, like the Rockefeller Foundation funding the research that generated the Green Revolution. Even in cases when it didn’t go to foundations, like the Vanderbilt fortune, it still ends up being spent away by future generations.
Yes. The Kennedys being a notable example of the old aphorism, “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.”
Yes, but Joe Kennedy was very smart in moving the family into politics, where the real easy money is.
Well, he tried. The generations subsequent to his own boys haven’t made much of a splash even there.
What are you babbling about? Have you been drinking? You think billionaires are demigods we should worship as our saviors. Deluded fool.
I don’t get it. Why do reentries into Huntsville, hundreds of miles from where this thing will launch, then cart it all the way back to Florida? Is politics really that important? Why not just land at the SLF instead?