By Diane Tennant The Virginian-Pilot September 3, 2014

HAMPTON

One of the crafts vying to be NASA's new commercial "space taxi" has a story that reads like a spy thriller - because it is.

The plot twists through Langley Research Center to Russia to Australia to the CIA, back to Langley and on to the Sierra Nevada Corp., a private company that hopes its Dream Chaser design will be the country's next manned spacecraft.

NASA will soon choose the design for the craft that will ferry astronauts to and from Earth orbit and the International Space Station, ending America's reliance on Russia for that service.

Three private companies are vying for it; more than one may be chosen to receive final development money. Two designs are capsules: Boeing's CST-100 and SpaceX's Dragon. Capsules have been used in the space program for decades.

Dream Chaser is different. It resembles a miniature space shuttle, but it's actually a lifting body, based on Langley's HL-20 design of the 1980s that relied on fuselage shape instead of wings to provide lift and keep the craft in the air.

That design has a long history.

At the beginning of the space race in the 1950s, a capsule was chosen to carry the Mercury astronauts into space and back. The capsule launched atop a rocket and dropped back to Earth, protected by a heat shield and slowed by a parachute before splashing down in the ocean.

Even then, some NASA engineers advocated for a lifting body design that could be flown like an airplane and landed on a runway. But the capsule was easier and cheaper, and America was in a hurry.

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The story behind what could be NASA's space taxi