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
Famous quotes containing the words personnel, launch and/or system:
“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.
“I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is made ... and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)