The shape now flying as Sierra Space's Dream Chaser was first sketched, in 1965, by a Soviet aerospace engineer who would not see anything resembling it reach orbit. The chain from the sketch to the spacecraft is six decades long, runs through five governments, and turns on a single roll of film taken from an Australian patrol aircraft in March 1983. The Russian-language histories tell most of it. The English-language histories tell the rest. Neither tells it cleanly, because the story does not lend itself to a clean telling. The American Space Shuttle, contrary to a popular framing, is not part of this lineage. The Shuttle and the Soviet program ran in parallel; the Shuttle's design choices were independent and, on the Soviet side, were eventually copied wholesale into a different vehicle (Buran).…