Dream Chaser; A commercial Venus atmospheric probe delivery system; NASA SBIR 2014 proposal

                                                                                      Dream Chaser; A commercial Venus atmospheric probe delivery system; NASA SBIR 2014 proposal

This concept is a buoyant pressurized sierra Nevada Dream Chaser spacecraft or Boeing spy plane that deploys a pressurized ballut out the cargo hold. Similar to last years buoyant Yellow Dragon proposal.This is a dual capsule system where one capsule and a deployble aerodynamic decelerator  docked to the aft end of the lifting body performs aerobreaking. After achiving orbit the capsule and lifting body undock. Capsule deploys probes while the lifting body orbits.

  In the alternative both spacecraft could  play the role of Venus orbital science platforms after performing a lifting body aerodynamic deceleration.

Images credit The Boeing company and Space.com    Credit: AIAA/Grantz/Boeing    http://www.space.com/13230-secretive-37b-space-plane-future-astronauts.html

If it’s not possible to perform a lifting body aerodynamic deceleration we would dock a SpaceX Dragon to the aft of the Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser to perform aerobraking at Venus. We need to model torquing  and strain issues in the docking tunnel.Dragon would need an ADAPT aerodynamic decelerator to prevent reentry plasma’s from damaging Dream Chaser wing structures.

last image on the right is the proposed Boeing X37C a human crew vehicle, we would re purpose it for  uncrewed Venus missions.

 conceivably science mission directorate funding of Dream Chaser together with commercial crew completes the dream chaser business case. Many of these ideas apply to  earth observation missions as well,to include weather and earth sciences.

IEEE-2012-1343

Glaze_UA STIM – VEXAG Goals

National Academy’s decadal survey requires science gaols and  instruments to achieve these goals.

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1119-0915 – Wercinski

1119-0955-Hall (1)

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1120-0900-Nakamura

1120-1615-Beauchamp

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Glaze_UA STIM – VEXAG Goals

hunter_Venus workshop presentation fin b 1121-1100-LImaye-Cutts

                                                                                                              THE BUSINESS CASE
We recover our costs by selling science data to NASA as an anchor tenant another space agency’s and by selling space on the spacecraft as a science “hosted payload” We hope for synergies between human rated flight systems and deep space flight systems,Dragon and Dream Chaser re-purposed as unmanned deep space science explorers enables robust deep space avionics to flow back into human crew systems and human rated avionics to benefit unmanned deep space systems.