NASA drops ISS cargo guarantee and forces Sierra space to pivot

When Sierra Space won a contract to deliver cargo to the International Space Station almost a decade ago, the company promised its first one in the commercial space market. A personally constructed rapid reuse and cargo return space plane that can land on commercial runways.

That dream has changed. In a contract change announced earlier this week, NASA and Sierraspace have agreed to remove the guarantees of agencies that purchase cargo flights to the ISS. Instead, The Dream Chaser Spaceplane debuted in a free-flying demo in late 2026, and will not dock into the station.

NASA said it would provide “minimum support” for its tests, and only then decided whether to order ISS supply missions.

The change in the contract is a blow to the Dream Chaser program. Typically, such programs rely heavily on government support, if not entirely. This is because the advance development costs for crew or cargo spacecraft are very high and rarely provide enough demand for commercial customers to close business cases.

SpaceX, for example, received billions of dollars from NASA through its Commercial Traffic Transport Services and Commercial Crew Program to develop Dragon Capsule and Falcon 9 Rocket.

So this change also means that Dream Chaser needs to undergo a major rebrand. The mission was to constantly resupply the ISS under NASA’s Commercial Supply Services Program, along with SpaceX’s Dragon and Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus. These agreements combine $14 billion caps across the three providers. NASA has previously mandated approximately $1.43 billion for Sierra Space, but it could be as long as the commitment is now underway.

With that guaranteed revenue gone, Sierra Space is currently facing the challenge of relocating itself as a dual-use platform that can serve commercial space stations and defense customers.

According to a press release issued Thursday, company executives are pushing hard against the defence angle. Its executive chairman Fati Ozmen said the transition will allow Sierra to “provide unique features to meet the needs of a diverse mission profile, including emerging and existential threats and national security priorities.”

Medium-term pivots are relatively rare in aerospace, but have become more common as space startups re-prioritize governments and contest the need to prove the commercial market before they existed. Historically, aerospace systems have been designed around a very specific mission profile, but the Sierra claims they are flexible due to the reusability of the Dream Chaser and the runway functionality.

The free-flying demonstration will help Sierra showcase the flexibility of Dream Chaser. This allows you to host different payloads and demonstrate other features without docking to the ISS.

Time is running out. The ISS is scheduled for Deorbit around 2030, with Dream Chaser remaining only a few years to demonstrate cargo delivery on track. But if Dream Chaser can prove itself, it can trustfully serve multiple customers and carve out a valuable niche as the only winged spacecraft on the market.