Sierra Space, a leading commercial space company and emerging defence tech prime building a platform in space to benefit and protect life on Earth announced today the successful completion of the initial phase of environmental testing on the revolutionary Dream Chaser® spaceplane, Tenacity®, at NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Sandusky, Ohio.
Over the past month, the Sierra Space Dream Chaser and its cargo companion, Shooting Star™, underwent rigorous vibration testing while stacked in launch configuration inside the Mechanical Vibration Facility at the NASA complex. In readiness for launch from Kennedy Space Center, the tests exposed the vehicles to the intense conditions of launch vibrations using the world’s most powerful spacecraft shaker table. See video here.
“We are coming out of years of development, years of hard work and years of resolving tough engineering challenges that come from revolutionary new ways of doing things,” said Sierra Space CEO Tom Vice. “This phase of development illustrates how Dream Chaser and the Shooting Star cargo module will handle the mechanical rigours of launch. This is the year that we transition from development and enter orbital operations – it is the year that changes how we connect space and earth.”