Nice.<p>They're going directly from helicopter drop tests of landing on a runway to a launch with docking at the ISS. No suborbital flight and landing first. No orbital flight without docking first. That's ambitious. If it works, that will be impressive.<p>There's a "national security version" being planned. This looks much like the US Space Force's official painting.[1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3566022/space-operations-command-reveals-futuristic-official-painting/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.spaceforce.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3566...</a>
This Dream Chaser thing reminds me a rarely known USSR orbital "passanger" spaceplane MiG-105[1] from 70s codenamed "Spiral", as it shares same concept. It made a couple of successful suborbital flights, but then the programme was cancelled in favour of Buran[2].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-105</a>
[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)</a>
> roughly half of the [NASA space] shuttle's habitable volume<p>> it features an add-on cargo module that is not reusable.<p>It's hard for me to get excited about this when Starship dominates it in size and (I'm guessing) cost per kg to orbit, on a similar time frame. It's only useful in a world where Starship fails its reusability goals. While Starship's success isn't certain, I wouldn't bet a company on its failure.
It's sobering how much less ambitious the Dream Chaser space plane is compared to the plans for the VentureStar:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VentureStar</a><p>It sometimes seems technology is going backwards.