Dream Chaser

The Sierra Nevada Corporation is developing the Dream Chaser spacecraft, which is designed to ferry humans to and from low Earth orbit, launching on a rocket and landing on a runway, much like NASA's space shuttle. While it borrows from the shuttle, it also has a more interesting history.

In the early 1980s, U. S. assets recorded the Soviets recovering a small, sleek spacecraft, which seemed to be an answer to the American shuttle. (The Soviets also built Buran, a close cousin of the shuttle, which flew precisely once.) NASA engineers were given photos of the small craft, and they began to "reverse engineer" it. That effort was so successful it developed into the NASA project, the HL-20. The HL-20 was eventually canceled, but the work done on that project serves as the basis of the Dream Chaser program.

SNC-- which is based in Colorado, not near the Sierra Nevadas-- plans to have a short test flight of Dream Chaser in 2013 and an orbital flight in 2014.