The HL-20 Personnel Launch System was a circa 1990 NASA spaceplane concept for manned orbital missions studied by NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. HL-20 was envisaged as a lifting body re-entry vehicle that was loosely based on 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 ever built. This vehicle was inspired by the Soviet project Spiral.
Read more about HL-20 Personnel Launch System: PLS Concept, Lifting Body Development, Proposed Missions, Design Features, Contracted Efforts, Legacy
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“This woman is headstrong, obstinate and dangerously self- opinionated.”
—Report by Personnel Officer at I.C.I., rejecting Mrs. Thatcher for a job in 1948.
“Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
and life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
in the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
with its store of food and little cooking pans
and change of clothes,”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“[Madness] is the jail we could all end up in. And we know it. And watch our step. For a lifetime. We behave. A fantastic and entire system of social control, by the threat of example as effective over the general population as detention centers in dictatorships, the image of the madhouse floats through every mind for the course of its lifetime.”
—Kate Millett (b. 1934)