NASA’s newest cargo spacecraft began life as a Soviet space plane

NASA's HL-20 in the fog at Langley Research Center in Virginia. (credit: NASA)

Last week when NASA awarded Sierra Nevada a contract to develop its Dream Chaser vehicle for cargo delivery to the International Space Station, it validated a design that dates back half a century. This particular winged vehicle concept marked the Soviet Union’s first attempt to develop a space plane and now, in an ironic twist of history, the Soviet design may help the United States to commercialize space.

The Dream Chaser traces its heritage to the BOR series "Беспилотный орбитальный ракетоплан," or uncrewed orbital rocket plane of lifting bodies, which themselves were derived from a 1965 space plane concept, the Soviet MiG-105. The BOR-1 was first tested in 1969, launching to an altitude of 100 km as the Soviets sought to study various heat shields for a winged vehicle.

A 1:2 scale mockup of the BOR-4 (Wikimedia).

The Soviets continued a series of test flights leading up to the BOR-4 vehicle, and it began flying in 1980. Although they had discarded the BOR concept for their space plane (choosing instead the shuttle-derived Buran orbiter), Soviet engineers continued to use the vehicle as a means to test the Buran’s thermal protection system.

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