With Atlantis landing at 9:44 a.m. EST in a matter of hours, I thought I’d use today’s concept post to look at some of the various space plane concepts. There have been several attempts to make single-stage to orbit spacecraft, and low cost reusable shuttles. With these just being a few of them. Enjoy.

Pictured is an artist’s concept of the experimental Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV), the X-37 located in the cargo bay of a space shuttle with Earth in the background. The X-37 was designed to launch from the space shuttle’s cargo bay as a secondary payload. Once deployed, the X-37 would remain on-orbit up to 21 days performing a variety of experiments before re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere and landing. The X-37 program was discontinued in 2003.

In 2006, the United States Air Force decided it would develop its own spacecraft from the original X-37 now the X-37A, and thus was born the X-37B. Which is scheduled for its first flight on April 19th, 2010. Unlike the image above, the X-37B will fly atop an Atlas V rocket rather than inside the Shuttle’s cargo bay.

You can learn more about the X-37B here, and see an image of the USAF’s first orbital spaceplane here and here.

Artist concept of the MAKS. The MAKS spaceplane is a canceled Russian air-launched orbiter project that was proposed in 1988, but canceled in 1991. The orbiter was supposed to reduce the cost of transporting materials to Earth orbit by a factor of ten. The reusable orbiter and its external non-reusable fuel tank, was to have been launched by an Antonov AN-225 airplane. Had it been built, the system would have weighed 275 tonnes, and would have been capable of carrying a 7 ton payload.

More about MAKS can be found here.

Artist concept of the HL-20 Personnel Launch System. Studied by NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, based on an enhanced lifting body candidate for manned orbital missions. The concept was designed for low operations cost, improved flight safety and conventional runway landings.

The Lockheed Martin X-33 was an unmanned, sub-scale technology demonstrator for the VentureStar under the Space Launch Initiative. The VentureStar was planned to be a next-generation, commercially operated reusable launch vehicle. The X-33 would flight-test a range of technologies that NASA believed it needed for single-stage-to-orbit reusable launch vehicles (SSTO RLVs), such as metallic thermal protection systems, composite cryogenic fuel tanks for liquid hydrogen, the aerospike engine, autonomous (unmanned) flight control, rapid flight turn-around times through streamlined operations, and its lifting body aerodynamics.

For more information on the demise of the X-33, you can read more here.

The Rockwell X-30 was the United States first attempt at an SSTO, but was canceled before ever being built.

SKYLON is an unpiloted, reusable spaceplane intended to provide inexpensive and reliable access to space. Currently in proof-of-concept phase, the vehicle will take approximately 10 years to develop and will be capable of transporting 12 tonnes of cargo into space.

SKYLON will be able to repay its development costs, meet its servicing and operating costs and make profits for its operators whilst being an order of magnitude cheaper to customers than current space transportation systems.

To learn more about the Skylon, you can reach the company website here. click on current projects, and then Skylon.