Sierra Space lays off part of staff after completing first spaceplane

This week Sierra Space laid off hundreds of employees after sending its first Dream Chaser spaceplane to final testing before launch. While this might seem concerning, Sierra Space is in good financial shape and this is just part of a company reshuffling now that it has gotten through its first run of production.

Sierra Space realigning its priorities

Sierra Space confirmed to CNBC that the company laid off about 165 employees this week. The company also laid off an unknown number of contractors that worked on Dream Chaser’s construction. In total, the number could be in the hundreds.

The first Dream Chaser spaceplane was completed earlier this month and was just shipped off to NASA‘s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Ohio for testing before launch. This is one of the final steps before Dream Chaser is sent down to Florida for integration on a ULA Vulcan rocket.

The layoffs come as Sierra Space plans to reshuffle its priorities now that it has completed the first of its spaceplanes. The company went on a hiring spree earlier in the year to get enough personnel to catch up on the work needed to launch Dream Chaser next year.

Sierra Space is also moving 150 employees with security clarences over from Sierra Nevada Corporation, of which Sierra Space was spun out of a few years ago, to focus on classified security contracts.

We know that Dream Chaser will have many use cases. The first will be with NASA, delivering cargo to the International Space Station for the Commercial Resupply Services-2 contract. Eventually Sierra Space will want to make Dream Chaser crew capable but it is also working to offer the spaceplane to the Department of Defense.

The company is pretty tight lipped on what sort of offerings Dream Chaser can bring to the DoD, who is already served by Boeing’s X-37B, owned by the Air Force and operated by the Space Force. Never say never, as the Space Force is very open to new, commercial owned and operated, services.

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So Dream Chaser is launching when?

Dream Chaser will launch on ULA’s Vulcan rocket and once it’s done being up in space, it will come back and land on a runway. That method is all very similar to both the Space Shuttle and X-37B.

Its first mission will be a demonstration flight, similar to SpaceX’s DM-1 or COTS-1 and 2 for its Dragon spacecraft. Dream Chaser is currently slated to fly on Vulcan’s Cert-2 mission early next year. Vulcan’s first flight, Cert-1, has its first launch window opening up Christmas Eve. That’s right, we might get Vulcan for Christmas. I’m kinda excited.

Currently, Dream Chaser is on its way, or is already there, to Ohio for tests. After that it could be shipped back to Colorado to finish anything up before launch.

However, ULA will have to launch its first Vulcan mission with Astrobotics’ lunar lander on it. That mission has some specific and short windows each month it can fly. So any issues ULA finds in its first live launch countdown could cause delays for Dream Chaser’s first flight as well.