Northern Nevada company aims high

SPARKS -- John Roth can't see Russia from his house.

But as vice president of Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Space Systems, Russia is definitely on his radar.

More than 42 years after the United States beat the Soviet Union in a hotly contested race to the moon, America has to rely on its former rival just to get men to space.

"Since the shuttle has been retired, the only way to get astronauts to the space station is to pay Russia $65 million per person, and that cost is likely to increase in the next few years," Roth said. "The situation has gotten so bad that we can't even get astronauts to the space station."

Roth hopes that one small step his company took years ago will lead to one giant leap for both Sierra Nevada Corp. and the U.S. space program. That would be buying the intellectual property for a discontinued NASA project that Sierra Nevada Corp. is leveraging into its Dream Chaser spacecraft. With the Dream Chaser rocketing itself into the second phase of a NASA crew vehicle program, a craft with Northern Nevada links has the potential to be the future ride of U.S. astronauts.

"It came about from a leap of faith, it really did," Roth said. "One of our predecessor companies was a very small satellite company, but its founder and owner had very big ambitions. About eight years ago, he really saw the potential in doing interplanetary travel vehicles, which is when the Dream Chaser concept started."

Space Systems is one of seven business areas that make up Sierra Nevada Corp., a Sparks-based company that has 2,200 employees working in 36 locations in 20 states. Other business areas include intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance, communications navigations surveillance and air traffic management.

The baby in the Sierra Nevada Corp. family, the Colorado-based Space Systems division, was formed after Sierra Nevada Corp. bought three smaller companies and merged them into one business area. One of those companies was SpaceDev, which Sierra Nevada Corp. acquired in late 2008.

Part of SpaceDev's portfolio was the Dream Chaser, which is based on NASA's HL-20 design. The HL-20 originally was designed as an escape craft for the International Space Station. But the project was scrapped because of budget cuts.

SpaceDev then incorporated elements of the HL-20 design from NASA, which became the framework for developing the Dream Chaser. The NASA pedigree came with several advantages, Roth said.

"The HL-20 has already undergone thousands of wind tunnel tests and structural models, which means we already had a good vehicle to start work from," Roth said. "Having that NASA heritage and all that testing behind it was also pretty critical for us to have credibility."

The credibility has paid off. The seven-crew Dream Chaser has made it to Phase 2 of NASA's Commercial Crew Development Program. The CCDev program was created to find a successor to one of the space shuttle's roles -- bringing astronauts to space.

Other competitors that made the second phase are Boeing and SpaceX, which are both developing capsules, as opposed to the winged space plane design of the Dream Chaser.

Advancing in the CCDev program would be a boon for Sierra Nevada Corp., which already has received $100 million from NASA for making it to both rounds of CCDev.

"This is potentially going to be a $1 billion to $1.5 billion program that's going to be split between two to three contractors, so it's a big deal," Roth said. "We would very much like to have a large share of that funding."

Companies that are awarded a piece of the CCDev pie will be part of a business model that sees NASA contracting privately for transporting astronauts.

"NASA won't own the vehicle like the space shuttle," Roth said. "What NASA is doing is co-investing with commercial enterprise to develop a vehicle, which a company will own and operate."

The approach comes with several advantages, including faster development speed and lower cost, Roth said.

If things go well with the CCDev program, Sierra Nevada Corp. expects to have the Dream Chaser flying by 2016 and serving the space station by 2017.

"We have some retired astronauts working for us, and believe me, the fact that the U.S. has no way of getting its own astronauts to space is a huge issue for them," Roth said. "It's a huge matter of national pride."