In the emerging field of private space tourism, Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic venture tend to get all the attention, but there are other entrepeneurs out there who’ve decided it’s time to find a way to get human beings off this rock, if only for a few minutes.

One of those is Jim Benson, whose Benson Space Company has been working on a space ship modelled after NASA’s HL-20 “lifting body” concept.

Today, however, I’m reading that BSC is abandoning its lifting-body work and will instead base its Dream Chaser sub-orbital spacecraft on a melding of several other vehicles with impressive track records — the X-2 and X-15 experimental planes, and the venerable T-38 trainer. And it’ll look something like this:

I found myself almost instinctively liking the looks of this design, and it took me a second to realize why. It’s an almost perfect real-world embodiment of the classic 1950s movie rocketship. Compare, for example, the Space Ark from George Pal’s 1951 film When Worlds Collide:

I grumble a lot on this blog about the future I got not looking much like the future I was promised by pop culture; maybe just this once, I won’t be able to make that particular complaint.

(Incidentally, I’m not at all sorry to see the lifting-body concept go in the waste bin. Those things make me nervous. No doubt as a result of constant exposure to footage of one crashing when I was a kid…)