Hey,
So this is the last in my series of diaries about the space shuttle replacements
You've seen:
The Dragon
The Cygnus
The Orion-lite
I now present the last 2 in the series (and there is a reason I am presenting them together)
The Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dreamchaser, and the Blue Origin mystery craft
The Dreamchaser is being built by Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC). Originally, it was being built by Spacedev, but Spacedev was acquired by Sierra Nevada Corporation in 2008. SpaceDev & Sierra Nevada Corp have acted as subcontractors on a number of projects - SpaceDev built the engine for SpaceShipOne, and SNC is doing the engine for SpaceshipTwo. SNC also won $20 Million from NASA (through the stimulus act), to work on the Dreamchaser (more evidence of the great stuff the stimulus has helped).
Dreamchaseris a mini-shuttle, based on NASA's HL-20, which is based on the BOR-4 Soviet Spaceplane. Originally it was being pursued as a purely suborbital craft. However, SpaceDev decided that it could be scaled up to an orbital craft. The current plan is to launch it on the Atlas V 402 (I talked about this in a previous Space Shuttle Replacement diary). It can carry 7 people, to ISS (or to another space station), as well as supplies. While Dreamchaser was a runner up in the original COTS competition, it did not get either of the COTS contracts. However, SNC continued development on it, and also had an unfunded Space Act Agreement, with NASA, for developing the Dreamchaser.
The final vehicle is from a company called Blue Origin. For those of you who don't know, Blue Origin is well known as a commercial spaceflight company founded by Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com founder). What was pretty well established was the suborbital component to his company, with a test vehicle called Goddard,and an operation vehicle called New Shepard). But it turns out they are also working on an orbital vehicle.
Details are a little sketchy - we have literally 1 picture, we know its a biconic (that means its has 2 cone - you can see in the pictures), its launched on an Atlas V 402 (notice a pattern about this rocket :D ), it uses a pusher plate to escape, and there is a composite pressure vessel involved as well. Also, they got some money from the stimulus money, to develop the pusher plate & composite pressure vessel.
How many will we see? I don't know. But you can bet we'll see more than one - we might see all of them.