Sierra Space says it has won payload contracts for its Tenacity Dream Chaser
Tenacity undergoing tow tests, in November 2025,
tests that should have been done years earlier.
Click for original image.
In a very vague press release yesterday, Sierra Space announced that it has secured a variety of contracts from a number of military and commercial customers to fly payloads on the first flight of its Tenacity Dream Chaser mini-shuttle.
The release identified none of the agencies or companies involved, only stating the following:
Sierra Space is finalizing the manifest with defense, civil, and commercial payloads, offering customers the opportunity to demonstrate capabilities on a platform that will set the standard for the next era of orbital operations.
Back in 2024 Sierra Space said Tenacity would launch before the end of the year on a demo flight to ISS — for NASA — but that flight was canceled. A year later in 2025 NASA canceled its seven-mission cargo contract with Sierra, replacing it with a single orbital test flight. Another year has passed and no flight has occurred, and two press releases from Sierra in November 2025 and April 2026 strongly suggested the spacecraft simply wasn’t ready for launch, even then.
This new press release suggests the company is trying to drum up business, but has not yet been able to convince anyone to sign on the dotted line. Tenacity might finally be ready to fly, but the company’s lack of transparency and the very very long development timeline with many broken promises (which began in 2016 when NASA first awarded the company the cargo contract) has apparently made potential customers skittish, for good reason. After more than a decade of development, nothing has yet flown.
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No specifics, no credibility.
And no future either, in all probability. The ISS logistics model of using small capsules/spaceplanes to carry modest cargos and small crews to and from – each requiring a separate launch of a significant vehicle and with the capsules/spaceplanes needing to spend extended periods parked at their destination – is simply far too expensive for commercial space stations to employ going forward. Sharing logistics launches across multiple stations – both crew and cargo – is the only economically viable path. The only vehicle with near-term availability capable of providing such a service at a reasonable per-seat and per-kilogram price is Starship – if SpaceX is willing to provide such.
The dragon capsule is still the best private industry stations have as escape capsules.
I learned today that the Dream Chaser is based on the HL-20
https://www.nasa.gov/hl-20-2/
The HL-20 design is modeled after a Soviet Union experimental spaceplane, the BOR-4. It was discovered by spy planes flying above the Indian Ocean in 1983. It exhibited a very good shape for Earth re-entry, so VAB began studying the plane at NASA Langley.
The U.S. created and tested this lifting body design a decade before BOR-4 flew.
Yup. Many of us were reminded of that every week during the 1970s as a lifting body of that design, or one similar to it, appeared in the opening credit sequence of the TV series The Six Million Dollar Man.
Mitt Romney kept losing his face-plate, so it had to be glued on
Gnomic utterance number X in a continuing series.
“Escape capsules” that are also logistics vehicles. That’s the problem. The basic conops model is not affordable or sustainable. There are only five Crew Dragons and SpaceX has no plans to make more. And once F9 is retired, they’d have no way to fly anyway. A clean-sheet-of-paper rethink of the entire LEO space station logistics issue is very much in order here.
They moved the Falcon launches to California.
There is no reason more Dragons can not be made. They are already being used as logistics vehicles and escape capsules..
They could lease the .design and manufacturing facilities to some other company.