Sierra Space

Recognized under Tier 3 — Structural Habitats, Sierra Space is a Colorado-based company developing the LIFE (Large Integrated Flexible Environment) inflatable habitat and the Dream Chaser reusable spaceplane. Working with ILC Dover, Sierra Space has repeatedly pressure-tested full-scale and one-third-scale LIFE structures at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, with its most recent full-scale Ultimate Burst Pressure test reaching roughly 77 psi — more than 27 percent above NASA's recommended 60.8 psi safety margin, and among the highest-loaded habitat structures ever tested. Dream Chaser, built to resupply Sierra's proposed Orbital Reef station (a joint effort with Blue Origin), has completed acoustic, EMI/EMC, and towing milestones at Kennedy Space Center ahead of a planned late-2026 debut flight to low Earth orbit under its NASA CRS-2 contract. Sierra Space's inflatable-structure data directly informs the low-mass, high-volume habitat designs needed to house crews affordably on the journey to, and surface of, Mars.