Jeebus, and people thought Lockheed Martin's CEV was ugly: Classic design inspires futuristic space glider

For years, rocketeer Geoff Sheerin has been hitching his star to a 60-year-old rocket design — the German V-2 rocket, which was adapted by the Soviets and Americans after World War II, then adapted again for Sheerin's Canadian Arrow project.

The suborbital Canadian Arrow hasn't yet gotten off the ground, but Sheerin and his new business partner, Chirinjeev Kathuria, have added another project to their PlanetSpace portfolio: a space glider called the Silver Dart, which is inspired by a 40-year-old design that was developed by Air Force researchers, only to be abandoned...

He and Kathuria, an Indian-American entrepreneur, plan to turn the 1960s-era FDL-7 hypersonic glider design into a proposal for NASA's latest program to commercialize transport services for the international space station...

Sheerin said he has been working undercover on the glider design over the past four years with aerospace expert Paul Czsyz — who was part of the original FDL-7 project in the late 1950s and early 1960s and is now a professor emeritus at St. Louis University.

According to Czsyz, the FDL-7 hypersonic vehicle was designed by the U.S. Air Force's Flight Dynamics Laboratory to support what would have been the military's Manned Orbital Laboratory. The space glider idea was abandoned in the late 1960s when the U.S. government decided against creating a military space station, but even in the mid-1970s, the design was adapted for an experimental aircraft design known as the X-24B.