this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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Certifying the prop system must be really bad if they're considering not berthing on the first flight. Wow.
That would be a bit of an anticlimactic maiden flight. Launch, rendezvous with the ISS, wave its stubbly little wings at the astronauts looking out the cupola, and then just go home again.
Worth it if it'll get them actual flight data. I'd rather have Dreamchaser do a little wave and come back home than go up with the goal of berthing, then run into a problem that flight testing could've discovered and be forced to abort. Sims and groundside testing run into diminishing returns eventually, while flight data can be fed back into the sim parameters.
I get the vibe that the holdup with the propulsion system is "sufficient margins". If that's the case, fly her, see how she performs, and fly a berthing mission on the second go with improvements to the entire craft. But if it's an uncertainty that the thrusters will perform as they expect at all, yes, groundside testing and development is the way to go here.