This morning around 7 am, the engines of a massive, beluga-bodied helicopter cut on with a rumble. The hum harmonized with the reverberations of Edwards Air Force Base, north of Los Angeles. As the Chinook’s two enormous rotor blades started to spin, blasting hot vapor smudged the monochrome stripes of pavement, desert floor, mountain ridge, and sky above NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center. And then, finally, the copter began to levitate. As it pulled itself higher and higher, a long tether spooled up from the ground.

At the other end of the rope, a new spacecraft called the Dream Chaser waited for that tether to go taut and pull it from the pavement. Compared to its escort, Dream Chaser is tiny: At 30 feet long, it looks like a Matchbox car crossed with a stingray. But it has outsize ambitions. Its maker, Sierra Nevada Corporation, calls it a “space utility vehicle," marketing it as a crew and cargo transport to low Earth orbit. After delivery, the idea goes, it will fly down to the kind of runways that line big-city airports. That could make it a uniquely accessible piece of space infrastructure—for NASA, other nations, or even companies that want to try their hands at spaceflight.

During today’s "captive carry" test, Sierra Nevada aimed to see whether its SUV rides as expected at the altitudes where it will later free-fly. But it’s not ready to go that high on its own, so the Chinook lifted it there, flying it around in loops like a parent keeping a hand on the back of a kid’s bike seat.

Sierra Nevada Corporation

The Dream Chaser’s basic design came from Russia—or, to be more precise, from spying on Russia. In June 1982, an Australian reconnaissance plane cruised over the Indian Ocean and saw a Soviet ship snapping up some kind of splashed-down spacecraft. The craft looked short and squat, more like a toy than a space-faring vehicle. Its wings bent up like the flaps of an airplane headrest.

The Australians, lacking a space program of their own, turned the photos over to the US, and American intelligence officers turned them over to NASA’s Langley Research Center.

Langley engineers took knives to cherry wood, carving out the vehicle that the Soviets called BOR-4. "We were reverse-engineering it,” Del Freeman, one of the employees who’d worked from those photos, told NASA in 2011. “Finally, we got enough information to build a model and we put it into [a wind] tunnel. When we tested it, we really figured out that we had something."

The Americans called their version the HL-20, imagining it as, among other things, a lifeboat for the International Space Station. But, as so many projects do, this one ended up at the back of a government-owned warehouse. In the early 2000s, though, Sierra Nevada Corporation was searching for a space vehicle design. They visited Langley, blew off the dust, and found one of the most extensively tested spacecraft that had never flown. But still could.