On March 1, 1988, U.S. Patent No. 4,728,061 issue to Caldwell Johnson, Maxime Faget, and David Bergeron on a Spacecraft Operable in Two Alternative Flight Modes.

The patent was owned by Space Industries, Inc., which was formed by one of the co-inventors, Maxime Faget, for the purpose of building a privately owned space station called the Industrial Space Facility (ISF). Faget was a retired chief of engineering and operations at NASA. The company lobbied the United States government to be an anchor tenant in the proposed space station, and the Reagan Administration requested funding from Congress, which was never approved. The company merged with Calspan Corporation, which in turn merged with General Dynamics Corporation,