Interestingly enough, DreamChaser is virtually identical to research NASA had been doing on shuttle replacement designs going back a couple decades, and those are in turn are very similar to something the Russians experimented with in a smaller subscale test vehicle called BOR-15... The US experimented with some smaller subscale test vehicles as well... some of them are in display in the USAF Museum in Dayton, OH... craft like the "Prime" and such... In fact, what has become "Dream Chaser" was basically what was going to be the "Orbital Space Plane", which was being designed as a possible shuttle replacement before the program was canceled in the shake-up around the time and shortly after the Columbia disaster... OSC was designed to be launched on an Atlas V (possibly the Heavy three-body variant). There were competitive designs such similar to what eventually became the CEV... when the OSC program was "dissolved", the vehicle proposals being studied under it rolled into the CEV program (Crew Exploration Vehicle). Small spaceplane designs were competing against new capsule designs, biconic capsules, lifting bodies, etc. Under OSC the frontrunners were spaceplanes and lifting bodies, followed by biconics and capsules being last. When OSC was dissolved and CEV took it's place, this focus was basically reversed with capsules and biconics taking the forefront with lifting bodies and spaceplanes falling out of favor, especially when Bush II's "Vision for Space Exploration" came out and made NASA's aims "Moon, Mars, and Beyond"... jobs for which a capsule is much better suited and a spaceplane is ill-suited to because of the additional mass of the aero-structures... So, the spaceplane was canceled and picked up by others commercially and developed into DreamChaser...
There's a report that I summarized over in the Scale section of the forum that details some of the shuttle replacement concepts that are quite similar to Dreamchaser if not the real thing... This idea for a DreamChaser like vehicle goes back at least as far as the early shuttle concepts, back when there were proposals for a much smaller, more Dreamchaser-like winged lifting body orbiter flying on top of a low-cost expendable pressure fed or pump fed booster designed for absolute lowest cost in manufacturing and recurring operations costs... (there's a study summarized on this as well over in the Scale section). When you really look at it, the idea goes back to at least Dyna-Soar... which goes back directly the Sanger Antipodal Bomber proposal the Germans considered back in WWII...
There's actually very little in the space business that's truly novel that hasn't been thought of or proposed at some point before... It's just a matter of tracing it back...
later! OL JR
