Even in the bloated-budget world of aerospace, $650 million is a lot of money. It's approximately the price of six of Boeing's workhorse 737s or, for the more militarily inclined, about the cost of seven F-35 stealth fighter jets. It's also the amount of money NASA and the Sierra Nevada Corp. spent developing the Dream Chaser, a reusable spacecraft designed to take astronauts into orbit. Sierra Nevada, which is based in Sparks, Nevada, and 100% owned by Eren Ozmen and her husband, Fatih, put in $300 million; NASA ponied up the other $350 million. The Dream Chaser's first free flight was in October 2013 when it was dropped 12,500 feet from a helicopter. The landing gear malfunctioned, and the vehicle skidded off the runway upon landing. A year later, NASA passed on Sierra Nevada's space plane and awarded the multibillion-dollar contracts to Boeing and SpaceX.
The original Dream Chaser, which looks like a mini space shuttle with upturned wings, now serves as an extremely expensive lobby decoration for Sierra Nevada's outpost in Louisville, Colorado. But the nine-figure failure barely put a dent in the Ozmens' dream of joining the space race. Within months of the snub, the company bid on another NASA contract, to carry cargo, including food, water and science experiments, to and from the International Space Station. This time it won. Sierra Nevada and its competitors Orbital ATK and SpaceX will split a contract worth up to $14 billion. (The exact amount will depend on a number of factors, including successful missions.) The new unmanned cargo ship, which has yet to be built, will also be called Dream Chaser.
The Ozmens, who are worth $1.3 billion each, are part of a growing wave of the uber-rich who are racing into space, filling the void left by NASA when it abandoned the space shuttle in the wake of the 2003 Columbia disaster. Elon Musk's SpaceX and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic are the best-known ventures, but everyone from Larry Page (Planetary Resources) and Mark Cuban (Relativity Space) to Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin) and Paul Allen (Stratolaunch) is in the game. Most are passion projects, but the money is potentially good, too. Through 2017, NASA awarded $17.8 billion toward private space transport: $8.5 billion for crew and $9.3 billion for cargo.
"We're doing it because we have the drive and innovation, and we see an opportunity--and need--for the U.S. to continue its leadership role in this important frontier," says Eren Ozmen, 59, who ranks 19th on our annual list of America's richest self-made women.
Until now, few had heard of the Ozmens or Sierra Nevada. Often confused with the California beer company with the same name, the firm even printed coasters that say #notthebeercompany. The Ozmens are Turkish immigrants who came to America for graduate school in the early 1980s and acquired Sierra Nevada, the small defense company where they both worked, for less than $5 million in 1994, using their house as collateral. Eren got a 51% stake and Fatih 49%. Starting in 1998, they went on an acquisition binge financed with the cash flow from their military contracts, buying up 19 aerospace and defense firms. Today Sierra Nevada is the biggest female-owned government contractor in the country, with $1.6 billion in 2017 sales and nearly 4,000 employees across 33 locations. Eighty percent of its revenue comes from the U.S. government (mostly the Air Force), to which it sells its military planes, drones, anti-IED devices and navigation technology.
Space is a big departure for Sierra Nevada--and a big risk. The company has never sent an aircraft into space, and it is largely known for upgrading existing planes. But it is spending lavishly on the Dream Chaser and working hard to overcome its underdog reputation.
"Space is more than a business for us," says Fatih, 60. "When we were children, on the other side of the world, we watched the moon landing on a black-and-white TV. It gave us goose bumps. It was so inspirational." Eren, in her heavy Turkish accent, adds: "Look at the United States and what women can do here, compared to the rest of the world. That is why we feel we have a legacy to leave behind."
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here are plenty of reasons that NASA gave Sierra Nevada the nod. Sure, it had never built a functioning spacecraft, but few companies have, and Sierra Nevada has already sent lots of components--like batteries, hinges and slip rings--into space on more than 450 missions. Then there's Dream Chaser's design. A quarter of the length of the space shuttle, it promises to be the only spacecraft able to land on commercial runways and then fly again (up to 15 times in total) to the space station. And its ability to glide gently down to Earth ensures that precious scientific cargo, like protein crystals, plants and mice, won't get tossed around and compromised on reentry. That's an advantage Sierra Nevada has over most other companies, whose capsules return to Earth by slamming into the ocean. Today, the only way the U.S. can bring cargo back from space is via Musk's SpaceX Dragon. "Quite frankly, that is why NASA has us in this program, because we can transport the science and nobody else can," says John Roth, a vice president in the company's space division.
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Space utility vehicle: Sierra Nevada’s unmanned Dream Chaser is designed to haul 6 tons of cargo to and from the International Space Station.COURTESY COMPANY
Sierra Nevada has acquired its way into space. In December 2008, in the throes of the financial crisis, Sierra Nevada plunked down $38 million for a space upstart out of San Diego called SpaceDev. The company had recently lost a huge NASA contract, its stock was trading for pennies and its founder, Jim Benson, a tech entrepreneur who became one of commercial spaceflight's earliest prophets, had just died of a brain tumor.
Sierra Nevada had its eyes on a vehicle from SpaceDev called the Dream Chaser. It had a long, storied past: In 1982, an Australian P-3 spy plane snapped photos of the Russians fishing a spacecraft out of the middle of the Indian Ocean. The Australians passed the images on to American intelligence. It turned out to be a BOR-4, a Soviet space plane in which the lift is created by the body rather than the wings, making it suitable for space travel. NASA created a copycat, the HL-20, and spent ten years testing it before pulling the plug.
Eleven months after the Columbia exploded, President George W. Bush announced that the space shuttle program would be shut down once the International Space Station was completed in 2010 (in fact, it took another year). In preparation NASA invited companies to help supply the station. By this point NASA's HL-20 was mostly forgotten and gathering dust in a warehouse in Langley, Virginia. SpaceDev nabbed the rights to it in 2006, hoping to finally get it into space.
