Dream Chaser has rough landing in test flight, but firm hails ‘successful day’ for space plane

[Eugene]

Source: Washington Post

Dream Chaser has rough landing in test flight, but firm hails ‘successful day’ for space plane

By Joel Achenbach, Tuesday, October 29, 2:28 PM

For the would-be spaceship named the Dream Chaser, everything on the first flight of a prototype went perfectly — until the craft touched down, toppled on its side, skidded off the runway and wound up in the sand of the Mojave Desert.

The unmanned test flight, conducted in hushed conditions Saturday at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California, came to an inelegant end after the left landing gear failed to deploy properly.

But the creator of the space plane, Sierra Nevada Corp., which is hoping to win a NASA contract to carry astronauts to the international space station, found much to celebrate despite the rough landing. The vehicle, dropped by a helicopter at 12,500 feet, flew autonomously in a steep dive, pulled up perfectly and glided to the center line of the runway, the whole flight precisely by the book until the very end, Mark Sirangelo, head of Sierra Nevada’s space unit, said in a teleconference Tuesday.

“We had a very successful day with an unfortunate anomaly at the end of the day on one of the landing gears,” Sirangelo said. Putting an even more positive spin on the floppy landing, he said, “Even the final ending, which did not roll out perfectly, provided some very valuable data for us as well.”

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Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/dream-chaser-test-flight-comes-to-inelegant-end/2013/10/29/317c2ea2-40b1-11e3-a624-41d661b0bb78_story.html

[Victor_c3]

1. I'm happy to hear that everything else worked fine

It's a shame that something as relatively basic as a landing gear failure led to the vehicle's destruction, but that makes me feel more comfortable about the prospect of the rest of the craft.