Last year, the Obama administration pushed through an ambitious transformation for NASA and turned to the commercial sector for astronaut transportation. The Dream Chaser is one of several new spacecraft that companies are hoping to launch into space with help from the government. It was inspired by a Soviet spacecraft. In 1982, an Australian reconnaissance airplane photographed a Russian trawler pulling something with stubby wings out of the Indian Ocean. It turned out to be a test flight of a space plane called the Bor-4, and the craft captured enough curiosity that engineers at NASA Langley copied it.