Cathy Booth Thomas has a fairly comprehensive overview of the space tourism industry at Time Magazine. I didn't see any mistakes in it, except I'm not sure what she means about Dreamchaser being Russian derived. I thought that it was based on the HL-20. That vehicle was inspired by a Russian design, but she probably should have mentioned the Langley heritage.

Well, the Delta Clipper, aka Clipper Graham, DC-X etc was never meant for NASA: it was a SDIO project.

I don't think the HL-20 was derived, even loosely, from a Russian design, if that is what you mean.

I believe the HL-20 design was based on earlier lifting body designs, notably, the HL-10.

I was just going on Mark Wade's site:

"The 'luxury' crew rescue vehicle option was the Langley Research Center's $2-billion HL-20 which was loosely based on a Soviet spaceplane design."

> I believe the HL-20 design was based on earlier lifting body designs, notably, the HL-10.

The HL-20 was a scaled-up version of the MiG-105 (without the variable dihedral).

The only thing derived from the HL-10 was the name.

But NASA did take over and run the DC-XA

Yep, and literally ran it into the ground.

But in fairness (and sadly), that was because DARPA had gone through its available funding*, and the project was technically dead for a few days, until Dan Goldin allowed the use of discretionary money to move it to NASA. The best decision he ever made, IMHO, in that it allowed us to get more operational data from the vehicle.

* And sometimes virtual teeth pulling was required to get them to use the money as intended:

http://www.islandone.org/SpaceAccessUpdates/930716-SAS-Alert.html

http://yarchive.net/space/launchers/dc-x.html