 Even though Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dream Chaser space plane wasn't selected to continue under NASA's Commercial Crew Program, they haven't given up just yet. This is your space pod for March 24, 2015. A lot of possibilities have opened to the Dream Chaser that could still see the space plane mature into a space-worthy commercial vehicle. First off, NASA announced yesterday that it amended their Space Act agreement with Sierra Nevada and added an unfunded milestone to their Commercial Crew Integrated Capabilities contract. The new milestone is called the Design Analysis Cycle 6 Closeout Review, and its purpose is to demonstrate the advancement of the Dream Chaser's design from a preliminary design review level of maturity to a critical design review level. And this milestone is scheduled to be completed by March of 2016. The continued support of NASA and their wealth of information about space planes and lifting bodies is going to be invaluable to Sierra Nevada Corporation, and they're very grateful for NASA's continued help. Sierra Nevada Corporation still has to complete another free flight test of the Dream Chaser, similar to the test in 2013 where one of its landing legs didn't deploy. The damage on that engineering test article has been repaired, but when the next test would occur it hasn't been released yet, and many feared that it wouldn't happen at all. But with this new additional milestone and NASA's continued support, if Sierra Nevada can complete these final two milestones, they would be in a better position to be considered for CRS-2 and to continue working with their other partners. CRS-2 is the second round of the Commercial Resupply Services contracts, which send cargo to the International Space Station, currently being outsourced to SpaceX and Orbital ATK. But for this round, Sierra Nevada Corporation has submitted their proposal for an all-cargo version of the Dream Chaser, which would feature foldable wings so that it could fit within the payload fairings of multiple launch vehicles, and it would also feature a small cargo module that would host pressurized and unpressurized cargo, and would also have the main docking system. The cargo module could be loaded with trash and disposed upon re-entry, and the Dream Chaser could continue with down-mass-like sensitive experiments, which could safely be returned to Earth. Sierra Nevada also completed a study last month in partnership with the German Aerospace Center and OHB Space Systems, a German space company, for utilizing the Dream Chaser for European purposes, and this whole project is aptly called the Dream Chaser for European Utilization. The European Space Agency, ESA, has also shown interest in the project, and all of this could lead to further studies or even actual flights. Sierra Nevada is also in partnership with Paul Allen's Vulcan Aerospace, and they're reviewing plans to launch a scaled-down version of the Dream Chaser on their Stratolaunch system. The Stratolaunch version of the Dream Chaser would be about 75% the size of the normal Dream Chaser, and one of the places it could possibly launch and land from would be the Shuttle Landing Facility, or Runway at Cape Canaveral, which both companies Vulcan Aerospace and Sierra Nevada have expressed interest in for using for their respective vehicles. This Stratolaunch system could accomplish a variety of missions, including suborbital science, possibly tourism, crewed missions of three to the International Space Station, or some sort of commercial space station, they're even talking about sending a crew of two to low Earth orbit for satellite resurfacing. Or even crewed or uncrewed science missions in space. The current plan for Stratolaunch is to make its first flight with an Orbital ATK rocket in 2018. The carrier plane is still being built, and the design of the rocket is still under review. As for Sierra Nevada, other than the remaining milestones for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, they also have a privately arranged contract with United Launch Alliance to launch the first Dream Chaser Orbital Test Flight in November of 2016 on an Atlas V rocket. This launch is being funded directly by Sierra Nevada, and is not part of a NASA contract. So in summary, even though its future is uncertain as the Dream Chaser moves forward, the one thing that is certain is that it's going to live to at least 2016, and hopefully beyond that to be able to see some of these possibilities come true. Thank you for watching this space pod, my name is Michael Clark, and I would love to know what you guys think about all these different possibilities that exist for the Dream Chaser. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our channel, and if you're interested in helping us out more, please visit patreon.com slash tmro to find out how you can become one of the citizens of tomorrow.