In 1965, chief designer Gleb Lozino-Lozinsky's team at Mikoyan started work on a spaceplane program the Soviets called Spiral. The concept was radical even by 1960s standards: a hypersonic mothership would carry a small crewed orbiter to Mach 6 at 30 km, release it, and a rocket booster would take it the rest of the way to orbit. On return, the orbiter would glide back to a runway on retractable jet engines.

The orbiter — designated MiG-105-11 EPOS (Experimental Passenger Orbital Aircraft) — had a shape that looks eerily familiar in 2026: a stubby lifting body with an upturned nose that earned it the nickname Lapot ("bast shoe" or "clog"). The wings folded upward to 60 degrees during reentry to hide behind the fuselage's heat shield, then rotated down for landing. It was 8 meters long, weighed 4.2 tons, and looked almost identical to what Sierra Space's Dream Chaser would become four decades later.

It actually flew. Between October 1976 and September 1978, test pilot Aviard Fastovets took the MiG-105-11 on eight subsonic test flights from a rough airfield at Faustovo. Some were self-powered takeoffs on a small turbojet; others were air-drops from a modified Tu-95KM bomber at 5,500 meters. On its last flight the landing gear collapsed and the aircraft was damaged. It never flew again.

The reason wasn't the crash. It was 1976 politics. When American plans for the Space Shuttle solidified, the Soviet Council of Ministers ordered a direct competitor. Spiral was shelved. Lozino-Lozinsky was reassigned to lead Buran — the Soviet Shuttle clone that flew exactly once, unmanned, in 1988, and then rusted in a hangar until the roof collapsed on it in 2002. The Spiral hardware went to the Monino museum.

What died with Spiral was every idea that turned out to be right:

• Small crew capsule, big payload separation. The Shuttle carried its crew and its 24-ton cargo bay together, meaning every satellite launch risked seven lives. Spiral separated them.
• Air-launch to reduce delta-V. Starting from Mach 6 and 30 km saves roughly 15% of orbital energy. Pegasus, Stratolaunch, and Virgin Orbit spent the next 50 years proving this works.
• Lifting-body reentry with hot-structure heat shield instead of the Shuttle's fragile tile mosaic that eventually killed Columbia in 2003.
• Runway landing on retractable jet engines for genuine airfield flexibility — no California-to-Florida ferry flights on a 747.

Why it could work now. The hypersonic mothership was the hard part in 1965 — Tupolev's proposed Mach 6 carrier aircraft was beyond the metallurgy of the day. In 2026 we have:

• Reusable methane-oxygen rocket engines (Raptor, Prometheus) that make a smaller expendable booster stage economical without needing an air-breathing mothership.
• Toughened Reinforced Carbon-Carbon and improved TUFROC tiles (as flown on X-37B for over 900 combined orbital days) that survive reentry without inspection between flights.
• Autonomous flight control — the X-37B has landed itself dozens of times. Spiral's original spec required a pilot; that constraint is gone.
• Composite airframes that would cut the 4.2-ton empty mass by roughly a third.

Sierra Space's Dream Chaser is now scheduled to fly cargo to the ISS in 2026 on a Vulcan booster. Its planform is nearly identical to the MiG-105-11 that Fastovets landed on a dirt strip in Faustovo in 1978. The Soviets had the shape right. They just picked the wrong political moment to bet on it.