HL-20 Personnel Launch System
The HL-20 Personnel Launch System was a NASA spaceplane concept for crewed orbital missions studied by NASA's Langley Research Center around 1990. It was envisaged as a lifting body re-entry vehicle similar to the Soviet BOR-4 spaceplane design. Its stated goals were to achieve low operational costs, improved flight safety, and a possibility of landing on conventional runways. No flight hardware was built.
HL-20 Mock-Up
Wax model of the HL-20, used for Wind Tunnel Testing.
HL-20 Depicted as leaving the planned Space Station Freedom.
Langley volunteers, wearing flight suits and helmets, were put through a series of tests with the craft placed both vertically and horizontally to simulate launch and landing attitudes.
A lifting body is a fixed-wing aircraft or spacecraft configuration in which the body itself produces lift. In contrast to a flying wing, which is a wing with minimal or no conventional fuselage, a lifting body can be thought of as a fuselage with little or no conventional wing. Whereas a flying wing seeks to maximize cruise efficiency at subsonic speeds by eliminating non-lifting surfaces, lifting bodies generally minimize the drag and structure of a wing for subsonic, supersonic and hypersonic flight, or spacecraft re-entry. All of these flight regimes pose challenges for proper flight safety.
US X-24A, M2-F3 and HL-10 lifting bodies
The Martin Aircraft Company X-24 built as part of a 1963 to 1975 experimental US military program
Burnelli General Airborne Transport XCG-16, a lifting body aircraft (1944)