Make no mistake, just getting a hacker con off the ground is a considerable challenge. But the really hard part comes after. To be more than a one-off success story, you’ve got to expand the event year after year in a manageable way. Go too slow, and attendees might lose interest. Move too fast, and you run the risk of going broke if your ticket sales don’t keep up with your ambitions.

Luckily for hackers living in the Philadelphia area, the folks behind JawnCon have once again demonstrated they’re able to thread the needle. While the ticket price remained the same as in 2024, this year an additional track of talks was introduced as well as expanded activities throughout the con. Even though it only wrapped this past weekend, there’s already buzz about what the event will look like in 2026.

Until then, let’s take a look at some of the projects that were on display at this year’s JawnCon. If it’s the talks you’re after, they’ll be edited and uploaded to the event’s YouTube page in the near future. In the meantime, the Friday and Saturday live streams are still available.

Meshtastic Spreads its Web

While it wasn’t officially part of JawnCon’s considerable network infrastructure playground, Meshtastic ended up being a big part of the two-day event. Members of Philly Mesh had a table where they were showing off a wide array of commercial and DIY nodes, the crew behind the Hacker Pager were offering up a special edition of the faux-retro portable communicator, and it seemed like every other attendee had brought their own mesh-capable gadget with them.

The end result was easily the most active Meshtastic environment I’ve ever personally found myself in. Wandering the con venue you could expect to see more than 100 individual nodes in the area, with the majority of them happily chattering away. Even during the off-hours on Friday and Saturday night, there was still plenty of mesh activity between the two main hotels where many of the attendees were staying.

Having a relatively active mesh added a new dynamic to the con. Occasionally, pieces of real-time information would make its way through the net, such as what time the nearby cafe was opening, or which talk was currently taking place. A few times it allowed for quick response to semi-emergencies, such as when some hackers which shall remain nameless ended up causing a minor spill, and found themselves in need of cleaning supplies.

It also provided even more data to pore over — since the con wrapped, an SQLite database containing every packet that went through the mesh has been floating around for anyone who wants to analyze it. Hope nobody said anything they’ll regret…

Wardrive All the Things

This year, [BusySignal] returned with another big box of radio hardware. Unlike the impressive wardriving rig he showed off during the first JawnCon, this new build isn’t limited to just WiFi and Bluetooth. The concept has now evolved to include other wireless signals thanks to a bank of software-defined radios (SDRs), ranging from a handful of RTL-SDRs for the easy stuff like 433 MHz wireless sensors, and a HackRF for when things get a bit more serious.

The rig, enclosed in a rugged orange case and powered by batteries, exists at least in part so that [BusySignal] can show off the considerable capabilities of Kismet. He argues that the open source wireless sniffing suite is capable of much more than casual users may realize, and wants to inspire developers and hackers to add new protocols to the already impressive array of signals that it’s able to ingest and display.

This exploration of Kismet’s capabilities was the subject of his Friday talk, Get More Radio Frequency Curious. Definitely one to keep an eye out for when the edited talks start hitting the JawnCon YouTube channel.

GameTank Comes Out to Play

Tucked away in one corner of the chill out area was an 8-bit game system that the passerby might have thought was a relic from the 1980s. But on closer inspection, its 3D printed shell quickly gives away the fact that is no classic machine.

The GameTank is an open source hardware retroconsole designed around the 6502, more specifically, the modern W65C02S variant. Clyde Shaffer created the system in the spirit of other fantasy consoles like the Pico-8, with the key difference being that he started from the physical console and worked his way forward from there. It features a modernized development and debugging environment for both C and Rust, including an emulator that will run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS. In fact, if you can take a hit to the performance, the emulator can even run right in the web browser — making it easy to check out the GameTank’s library of games.

We’ve actually covered the GameTank here on Hackaday in the past, but seeing it in person, you really appreciate all the little details. The cartridges specifically are a very nice touch. Of course, we know that a single modern SPI flash chip could  allow the GameTank to hold hundreds (if not thousands) of games internally. Yet there’s just something so nostalgic about rummaging through pile of cartridges, searching for a particular game, and then slamming it home into the console.

But is it any fun to play? To that end, I’m happy to say it passed the test with a few of the kids that ended up coming to JawnCon with their parents. I overheard someone at the lock picking table saying that their son had abandoned his expensive Nintendo Switch on the table in favor of pulling up a chair to the GameTank and basking in its CRT glory. Maybe the kids will be alright after all.

The Next Jawneration

It’s obviously very early to predict what the next JawnCon will look like. After all, a lot can happen in the next 359 days.

But having had the good fortune to attend all three of these events and see its trajectory, I can say in my mumble opinion that JawnCon is approaching an inflection point of sorts. While the area of Arcadia University that’s been made available for the con since its inception has never been particularly large, this was the first year it actually started to feel small. It’s no exaggeration to say that on several occasions, I struggled to find a surface flat enough to put my laptop down — whether it was lock picks, stickers, payphones, or even just cabling — literally every table in the room had something on it.

Of course, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If the worst that can be said about a hacker con was that it had a lot of people and so much interesting stuff on display that you couldn’t find a place to sit down, count me in. But in the same way keeping a plant in a pot that’s too small can stunt its growth, I think JawnCon will need to find a way to stretch its legs if it’s to remain healthy over the long term.

That being said, I plan on being there in 2026, and if you’re in the Philadelphia area, so you should you. Even if it means we might have to take turns sitting in each other’s laps.

In the history of entertainment, few properties have made the sort of indelible mark on popular culture as Star Trek has. In 950 episodes across the twelve television series that have carried the name, the franchise has made a spectacle not of explosions and machismo, but of competent professionals working together to solve complex problems. In the world of Star Trek, the coolest people in the room are the scientists, engineers, physicists, and doctors — is it any wonder so many in the sciences credit the show for putting them on their career path?

While the art direction of the original Star Trek series from 1966 was remarkably ahead of its time, these are some of the key individuals who were brought in to refine those early rough-hewn ideas into cultural touchstones. Their work ended up becoming more than simple entertainment, and ultimately helped inspire some of the real-world technology we use on a daily basis. The iconic LCARS computer interface predicted the rise of the touch screen, while its impossible to look at props such as the PADD and Tricorder and not see the parallels with modern tablets and smartphones.

The following Star Trek veterans are set to join us at Supercon 2025:

Beaming Up October 31st

We’re just a few weeks away from the start of Supercon 2025. If you’re interested in checking out this stellar (no pun intended) panel, or any of the other fascinating talks and workshops we’ve already announced, there’s still time to get tickets.

But don’t wait too long. Something tells us that the rest of those tickets will get snapped up quickly once we finally reveal this year’s badge, which will be coming very soon.

If I’m honest with myself, I don’t really need access to an off-grid, fault-tolerant, mesh network like Meshtastic. The weather here in New Jersey isn’t quite so dynamic that there’s any great chance the local infrastructure will be knocked offline, and while I do value my privacy as much as any other self-respecting hacker, there’s nothing in my chats that’s sensitive enough that it needs to be done off the Internet.

But damn it, do I want it. The idea that everyday citizens of all walks of life are organizing and building out their own communications network with DIY hardware and open source software is incredibly exciting to me. It’s like the best parts of a cyberpunk novel, without all the cybernetic implants, pollution, and over-reaching megacorps. Well, we’ve got those last two, but you know what I mean.

Even though I found the Meshtastic concept appealing, my seemingly infinite backlog of projects kept me from getting involved until relatively recently. It wasn’t until I got my hands on the Hacker Pager that my passing interest turned into a full blown obsession. But it’s perhaps not for the reason you might think. Traveling around to different East Coast events with the device in my bag, it would happily chirp away when within range of Philadelphia or New York, but then fall silent again once I got home. While I’d get the occasional notification of a nearby node, my area had nothing like the robust and active mesh networks found in those cities.

Well, they say you should be the change you want to see in the world, so I decided to do something about it. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to build up an entire network by myself, but I figured that if I started standing up some nodes, others might notice and follow suit. It was around this time that Seeed Studio introduced the SenseCAP Solar node, which looked like a good way to get started. So I bought two of them with the idea of putting one on my house and the other on my parent’s place down the shore.

The results weren’t quite what I expected, but it’s certainly been an interesting experience so far, and today I’m even more eager to build up the mesh than I was in the beginning.

Starting on Easy Mode

I didn’t make a conscious decision to start my experiment at my parent’s house. Indeed, located some 60 miles (96 km) from where I live, any progress in building out a mesh network over there wouldn’t benefit me back home. But it was the beginning of summer, they have a pool, and my daughters love to swim. As such, we spent nearly every weekend there which gave me plenty of time to tinker.

For those unfamiliar with New Jersey’s Southern Shore area, the coastline itself is dotted with vacation spots such as Wildwood, Atlantic City, and Long Beach Island. This is where the tourists go to enjoy the beaches, boardwalks, cotton candy, and expensive rental homes. But move slightly inland, and you’ll find a marshland permeated with a vast network of bays, creeks, and tributaries. For each body of water large enough to get a boat through, you’ll find a small town or even an unincorporated community that in the early 1900s would have been bustling with oyster houses and hunting shacks, but today might only be notable for having their own Wawa.

My parents are in one of those towns that doesn’t have a Wawa. Its very quiet, the skies are dark, and there’s not much more than marsh and water all around. So when I ran the SenseCAP Solar up their 20 foot (6 m) flagpole, which in a former life was actually the mast from a sailing catamaran, the results were extremely impressive.

I hadn’t had the radio up for more than a few hours before my phone pinged with a message. We chatted back and forth a bit, and I found that my new mesh friend was an amateur radio operator living on Long Beach Island, and that he too had just recently started experimenting with Meshtastic. He was also, incidentally, a fan of Hackaday. (Hi, Leon!) He mentioned that his setup was no more advanced than an ESP32 dev board sitting in his window, and yet we were reliably communicating at a range of approximately 6 miles (9 km).

Encouraged, I decided to leave the radio online all night. In the morning, I was shocked to find it had picked up more than a dozen new nodes. Incredibly, it was even able to sniff out a few nodes that I recognized from Philadelphia, 50 miles (80 km) to the west. I started to wonder if it was possible that I might actually be able to reach my own home, potentially establishing a link clear across the state.

Later that day, somebody on an airplane fired off a few messages on the way out of Philadelphia International Airport. Seeing the messages was exciting enough, but through the magic of mesh networking, it allowed my node to temporarily see networks at an even greater distance. I picked up one node that was more than 100 miles (160 km) away in Aberdeen, Maryland.

I was exhilarated by these results, and eager to get back home and install the second SenseCAP Solar node. If these were the kind of results I was getting in the middle of nowhere, surely I’d make even more contacts in a dense urban area.

Reality Comes Crashing Home

You see, at this point I had convinced myself that the reason I wasn’t getting any results back at home was the relatively meager antenna built into the Hacker Pager. Now that I had a proper node with an antenna bigger than my pinkie finger, I was sure I’d get better results. Especially since I’d be placing the radio even higher this time — with a military surplus fiberglass mast clamped into the old TV antenna mount on my three story house, the node would be around 40 feet (12 m) above the ground.

But when I opened the Meshtastic app the day after getting my home node installed, I was greeted with….nothing. Not a single node was detected in a 24 hour period. This seemed very odd given my experience down the shore, but I brushed it off. After all, Meshtastic nodes only occasionally announce their presence when they aren’t actively transmitting.

Undaunted, I made plans with a nearby friend to install a node at his place. His home is just 1.2 miles (1.9 km) from mine, and given the casual 6 mile (9 km) contact I had made at my parent’s place, it seemed like this would be an easy first leg of our fledgling network.

Yet when we stood up a temporary node in his front yard, messages between it and my house were only occasionally making it through. Worse, the signal strength displayed in the application was abysmal. It was clear that, even at such a short range, an intermediary node would be necessary to get our homes reliably connected.

At this point, I was feeling pretty dejected. The incredible results I got when using Meshtastic in the sticks had clearly given me a false sense of what the technology was capable of in an urban environment. To make matters even worse, some further investigation found that my house was about the worst possible place to try and mount a node.

For one thing, until I bothered to look it up, I never realized my house was located in a small valley. According to online line-of-sight tools, I’m essentially at the bottom of a bowl. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I noted that the Meshtastic application was showing an inordinate number of bad packets. After consulting with those more experienced with the project, I now know this to be an indicator of a noisy RF environment. Which may also explain the exceptionally poor reception I get when trying to fly my FPV drone around the neighborhood, but that’s a story for another day.

A More Pragmatic Approach

While I was disappointed that I couldn’t replicate my seaside Meshtastic successes at home, I’m not discouraged. I’ve learned a great deal about the technology, especially its limitations. Besides, the solution is simple enough — we need more nodes, and so the campaign to get nearby friends and family interested in the project has begun. We’ve already found another person in a geographically strategic position who’s willing to host a node on their roof, and as I write this a third Seeed SenseCAP Solar sits ready for installation.

At the same time, the performance of Meshtastic in a more rural setting has inspired me to push further in that region. I’m in the process of designing a custom node specifically tailored for the harsh marine environment, and have identified several potential locations where I can deploy them in the Spring. With just a handful of well-placed nodes, I believe it should be possible to cover literally hundreds of square miles.

I’m now fighting a battle on two fronts, but thankfully, I’m not alone. In the months since I’ve started this project, I’ve noticed a steady uptick in the number of detected nodes. Even here at home, I’ve finally started to pick up some chatter from nearby nodes. There’s no denying it, the mesh is growing everyday.

My advice to anyone looking to get into Meshtastic is simple. Whether you’re in the boonies, or stuck in the middle of a metropolis, pick up some compatible hardware, mount it as high as you can manage, and wait. It might not happen overnight, but eventually your device is going to ping with that first message — and that’s when the real obsession starts.

We at Hackaday are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Robert Murray-Smith. The prolific experimenter had spent over a decade on YouTube, creating more than 2,500 videos where he gleefully demonstrated his seemingly endless collection of homemade contraptions. At least eighteen of which ended up on the pages of Hackaday since we first crossed paths with him back in 2013.

Like many of you, we were also shocked to find that Robert made the decision to end his own life. As cliché as it might sound, he simply didn’t seem like the type. His demeanor was always boisterous in his videos, exhibiting an almost child-like joy as he showed off his latest creation with a laugh and smile.

But as explained by his brother Dave in the brief announcement video posted yesterday, his outward appearance was a well-rehearsed mask that covered a deepening depression. Regular viewers of Robert’s videos knew he lost his wife, as he shared a memorial video for her in April of 2024. What he was less open about with his viewers was his own health, which it turns out had been rapidly declining for the last few months.

We now know that simply getting up and walking around had become painful for Robert, a fact obscured by the fact that most of his videos saw him seated at his workbench or in the back garden. That he was able to continue making so many videos at all speaks not only to his passion for technology and engineering, but the great love he had for the community that he’d built.

From the video we also learned that Robert found it very difficult to discuss his declining mental and physical health with friends and family. For men of his generation, the “strong and silent type” was often the ideal. Given all that he was going through, nobody could fault him for experiencing a sense of hopelessness, and yet his brother explains that Robert would never admit to the difficulties he was facing. Whenever pushed to talk about his feelings, he’d respond with that phrase which we’ve all heard (and maybe used once or twice) — “I’m fine.”

Because of this, Robert’s family has partnered with the suicide prevention charity CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) to try and raise awareness about men’s mental health. They ask that anyone who wishes to honor Robert make a donation to CALM, in the hopes that they can help others who may find themselves in a similar situation.

It’s no great secret that many in the hacker and maker communities face their own daily struggles. Whether it’s from being neurodivergent, or the inability to fit in with mainstream society. Several of the staff here at Hackaday are from marginalized groups, and even among those who aren’t, let’s just say we have it on good authority that most of them didn’t get to sit with the “cool kids” back in high school. We also know that, just like Robert, many in the community find it difficult to communicate with others about how this impacts their mental health.

The lasting legacy of Robert Murray-Smith will of course be his incredible body of work, which will continue to inspire millions of viewers. But we can also honor him by making sure that we’re looking out for the well-being of friends, family, and even ourselves. There are resources available, and there’s no shame in asking for help when you need it.

For those local to the Philadelphia area, a “jawn” can be nearly anything or anyone — and at least for this weekend, it can even be a hacker con building up steam as it enters its third year. Kicking off this Friday at Arcadia University, JawnCon0x2 promises to be another can’t-miss event for anyone with a curious mind that lives within a reasonable distance of the Liberty Bell.

The slate of talks leans slightly towards the infosec crowd, but there’s really something for everyone on the schedule. Presentations such as Nothing is Safe: An Introduction to Hardware (In)Security and Making the GameTank – A New, Real 8-Bit Game Machine will certainly appeal to those of us who keep a hot soldering iron within arm’s reach, while Rolling Recon & Tire Prints: Perimeter Intrusion Detection and Remote Shenanigans via Rogue Tire Stem RF and Get More Radio Frequency Curious will certainly appeal to the radio enthusiasts.

Speaking of which, anyone who wants to make their interest in radio official can sit in on the Saturday study group led by Ed “N2XDD” Wilson, the Director of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) Hudson Division. After lunch, you can take your exam to become a licensed ham, and still have time to check out the lockpicking demonstrations from the local TOOOL chapter, the Retro Show ‘n Tell area, and rummage through the self-replenishing table of free stuff that’s looking for a new home.

Attendees can also take part in a number of unique challenges and competitions inspired by the shared professional experience of the JawnCon organizers. One of the events will have attendees putting together the fastest Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) broadband connection, as measured by era-appropriate commercial gear. Easy enough with a spool of copper wire, but the trick here is to push the legendary resilience of DSL to the limit by using unusual conductors. Think wet strings and cooked pasta. There’s also a Capture The Flag (CTF) competition that will pit teams against each other as they work their way through customer support tickets at a fictional Internet service provider.

We were on the ground for JawnCon in 2024, and even had the good fortune to be present for the inaugural event back in 2023. While it may not have the name recognition of larger East Coast hacker cons, JawnCon is backed by some of the sharpest and most passionate folks we’ve come across in this community, and we’re eager to see the event grow in 2025 and beyond.

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this week’s episode off with an update on the rapidly approaching 2025 Supercon in Pasadena, California. From there they’ll talk about the surprisingly high-tech world of vapes, a flying DeLorean several years in the making, non-contact pulse monitoring, and the potential of backyard radio telescopes to do real astronomy. You’ll hear about a dodecahedron speaker, a page turning peripheral, and 3D printed tools for unfolding boxes. They’ll wrap things up by taking a look at the latest generation of wearable smart glasses, and wonder if putting a bank of batteries in your home is really with the hassle.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download in DRM-free MP3.

Episode 339 Show Notes:

News:

• 2025 Hackaday Superconference: Announcing Our Workshops And Tickets

What’s that Sound?

• Think you know that sound? Fill out this form for a chance to win!

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• When Low SRAM Keeps The DOOM Off Your Vape
  • Hosting A Website On A Disposable Vape
• Full Scale Styrofoam DeLorean Finally Takes Flight
  • Full-Scale Flying DeLorean Gets Closer To Liftoff
  • Mega-CNC Router Carves Styrofoam Into A Full-Size Flying Delorean
• Heart Rate Measurement Via WiFi, The DIY Way
  • Heart Rate Monitoring Via WiFi
  • Hey Google, Is My Heart Still Beating?
• Low-Cost, High-Gain: A Smart Electronic Eyepiece For Capturing The Cosmos
• How A Failed Video Format Spawned A New Kind Of Microscope
• Listening For The Next Wow! Signal With Low-Cost SDR
  • The Wow! Signal And The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence
  • Damage To Arecibo Leaves Gaping Hole In Astronomy
  • Roofing Radio Telescope Sees The Galaxy

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Dodecahedron Speaker Is Biblically Accurate
  • Robot Balances Ball On A Plate
  • This Device Is A Real Page Turner
• Tom’s Picks:
  • Calculator Battery Mod Lets You Go The Distance
  • For A Robot Claw, The Eyes Have It
  • Mandrel Magic: Small Box Assembly With 3D Printing

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• Meta’s Ray-Ban Display Glasses And The New Glassholes
• How Regulations Are Trying To Keep Home Battery Installs Safe

While many in the industry were at first skeptical of NASA’s goal to put resupply flights to the International Space Station in the hands of commercial operators, the results speak for themselves. Since 2012, the SpaceX Dragon family of spacecraft has been transporting crew and cargo from American soil to the orbiting laboratory, a capability that the space agency had lost with the retirement of the Space Shuttle. Putting these relatively routine missions in the hands of a commercial provider like SpaceX takes some of the logistical and financial burden off of NASA, allowing them to focus on more forward-looking projects.

But as the saying goes, you should never put all of your eggs in one basket. As successful as SpaceX has been, there’s always a chance that some issue could temporarily ground either the Falcon 9 or the Dragon.

While Russia’s Progress and Soyuz vehicles would still be available in an emergency situation, it’s in everyone’s best interest that there be multiple backup vehicles that can bring critical supplies to the Station.

Which is precisely why several new or upgraded spacecraft, designed specifically for performing resupply missions to the ISS and any potential commercial successor, are coming online over the next few years.

In fact, one of them is already flying its first mission, and will likely have arrived at the International Space Station by the time you read this article.

Cygnus XL

The Cygnus was the second commercial spacecraft to deliver cargo to the ISS back in 2013, and like the Dragon, has gone through several upgrades and revisions over the years. Rather than starting from a clean slate, the Orbital Sciences Corporation based the vehicle’s pressurized module on the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module which was originally designed to fly inside the Space Shuttle’s cargo bay to provide onboard laboratory space before the construction of the ISS. This was paired with a service module that was derived from their line of communication satellites.

Orbital Sciences Corporation was eventually acquired by Northrop Grumman, which now operates the latest version of the spacecraft, the Cygnus XL. This latest version of the cargo craft lifted off for the first time on September 14th, and is currently en route to the ISS.

It retains the same 3.07 m (10.1 ft) diameter of the original Cygnus, but the length of the vehicle has been increased from 5.14 m (16.9 ft) to 8 m (26 ft). This has nearly doubled the internal pressurized volume of the craft, and the payload capacity has been increased from 2,000 kg (4,400 lb) to 5,000 kg (11,000 lb).

While the Dragon can autonomously dock with the ISS, the Cygnus XL needs to be captured by an astronaut using the Station’s robotic arm, and manually moved into position where it’s eventually bolted into place — a process known as berthing. This is a more labor intensive method of connecting a visiting spacecraft, but it does have at least one advantage, as the diameter of the berthing ports is larger than that of the docking ports. At least in theory, this means Cygnus XL would be able to deliver bulkier objects to the Station than the Dragon or any other spacecraft that makes use of the standard docking ports.

Like the earlier versions of the craft, Cygnus XL is an expendable vehicle, and lacks the heat shield that would be necessary to reenter Earth’s atmosphere safely. Once the vehicle delivers its cargo and is detached from the Station, it’s commanded to perform a deorbit maneuver which will cause it to burn up in the atmosphere. But even this serves an important function, as the astronauts will load the vehicle with trash before it departs, ensuring that refuse from the Station is destroyed in a safe and predictable manner.

HTV-X

Like the Cygnus XL, the HTV-X is an upgraded version of a spacecraft which has already visited the ISS, namely the H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV). Designed and built by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the first flight of this upgraded cargo vehicle is tentatively scheduled for late October.

The HTV-X reuses the pressurized module from the HTV, though it has been slightly enlarged and is now located at the rear of the spacecraft instead of the front. The cargo module is in turn attached to a service module that’s responsible for power generation, communications, and propulsion. For all intents and purposes, this service module is its own independent spacecraft, and JAXA is currently investigating future applications which would see this module mated with other payloads for various low Earth orbit missions.

Attached to the opposite side of the service module is an unpressurized cargo module. This is similar to the “trunk” of the Dragon spacecraft, in that it’s essentially just a hollow cylinder with shelves and mounting points inside. This module could potentially be used to bring up components that are intended to be attached to the outside of the ISS, or it could hold experiments and modules that are designed to be exposed to the space environment.

Like the Cgynus XL, the HTV-X will berth to the ISS rather than dock, and it will also burn up after its mission is complete. However the HTV-X is designed to fly freely on its own for up to 18 months after it delivers its cargo to the Station, which JAXA calls the “Technology Demonstration Phase” of the mission. This will essentially allow the agency to perform a second mission after the vehicle has completed its supply run, greatly improving the overall cost effectiveness of the program.

Dream Chaser

Far and away the most ambitious of these new spacecraft is the Dream Chaser, developed by Sierra Space. Reminiscent of a miniature version of the Space Shuttle, this winged vehicle is designed to land like an airplane at the end of its mission. This not only means it can bring material back down to Earth at the end of its mission, but that it can do so in a much less jarring manner than a capsule that ends up splashing down into the ocean under parachutes. This is a huge benefit when dealing with fragile cargo or scientific experiments, and is a capability not offered by any other currently operational spacecraft.

The Dream Chaser has been in active development for over 20 years, but its origins date back even farther than that, as it’s based on HL-20 Personnel Launch System concept from the 1980s. While it was initially designed for crew transport, it lost out to SpaceX and Boeing during NASA’s Commercial Crew Program selection in 2014. It did however secure a contract from the space agency in 2016 for six cargo missions to the ISS. To qualify for these missions, several changes were made to the original design, such as the addition of an expendable module that will attach to the rear of the vehicle to increase its relatively limited internal cargo capacity of 910 kg (2,000 lb) by 4,500 kg (10,000 lb).

The first orbital test flight of the Dream Chaser is currently scheduled to take place before the end of the year, but that date has already slipped several times. Being a reusable vehicle like the Dragon, the first Dream Chaser spaceplane is expected to fly multiple operational missions while a second craft is being assembled.

After completing their contractually obligated missions to the ISS, there are currently plans for the Dream Chaser to fly at least one mission for the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, which will carry an array of scientific experiments provided by member nations that do not have their own domestic space programs. The company also says they remain committed to bringing the crewed version of Dream Chaser to fruition, likely as part of their partnership with Blue Origin to develop the Orbital Reef — a “mixed-use business park” in space.

Time is Running Out

It might seem strange that three different spacecraft are scheduled to enter service before the end of the year, but of course, the clock is ticking. Although the date has been pushed out a number of times over the years, the current 2030 timeline for the decommissioning of the International Space Station seems to be holding so far. With as little as five years left to go before the ISS joins us Earthlings back here on the surface, it’s now or never for any vehicles designed for service missions. This is doubly true for companies such as Sierra Space, who have already agreed to perform a set number of missions.

At the same time, any of these vehicles could support a future commercial space station, should one actually materialize. We’ve covered some of the post-ISS plans previously, but given how volatile the aerospace world is, nothing is a given until it’s actually in orbit.