ENGLEWOOD, Colorado – A space plane designed for hauling passengers and cargo into Earth orbit was shown here June 21—the SpaceDev Dream Chaser—one of a handful of finalists in NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Demonstration (COTS) effort.

The vehicle is a candidate for NASA’s four year $500 million COTS initiative. The Dream Chaser would be capable of carrying one to six people and/or cargo to the International Space Station, with the winged craft able to return to almost any runway in the world.

Dream Chaser draws from extensive work and evaluation of NASA’s HL-20 lifting body—an enhanced horizontal lander advanced by the space agency’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. The HL-20 itself evolved from work in the 1960s and 1970s on several lifting body shapes.

In the 1990s, with increasing national interest in obtaining routine access to space, a number of Earth-to-orbit transportation systems were being studied by NASA. One concept, dubbed the Personnel Launch System (PLS), could have utilized the HL-20 and an expendable launch system to provide human access to space complementing the space shuttle.

This article is written by By Leonard David, Senior Space Writer and can be read in its entirety at SPACE.com.