A consortium of companies will try to establish the business case for a reusable space plane in a new European Space Agency (Esa) funded study.
The concept under investigation is Skylon, a vehicle proposed by the UK firm Reaction Engines Ltd (REL).
Skylon would be powered by an air-breathing rocket engine that could enable it to take off and land at a standard runway.
Esa funding for the study is 1m euros and it runs to the end of the year.
It will look at how a Skylon vehicle might operate in a market for satellite launches from the early 2020s onwards.
The research will be led by REL themselves. It will address the economics and some of the outstanding technical issues.
The latter includes examining the type of spaceport needed by the vehicle; and the team will visit French Guiana to see how a Skylon could fly out of Europe's existing launch facility in the territory.
There will be work done also to define more clearly the upper-stage carrier required for the Skylon concept.
As envisaged, the plane would fly to just above 300km and then release a secondary propulsion module to place a satellite in its final orbit. For telecommunications spacecraft, this would be at an altitude of 36,000km. It is an approach that was adopted by the US space shuttle in its early years.
Thales Alenia Space (TAS) of Italy will look at the specifications of this carrier, with assistance from Astrium Germany. The desire is to make it recoverable, so that after deploying the satellite, the propulsion module would return to Skylon to be brought back down to Earth for use on a later mission.
This is cool and all, but I've been hearing this since the 1980's (with HOTOL) which was eventually cancelled. This might become reality in the early twenties Imagine that, the UK pioneering space
It's a shame the West never really got past the Shuttle program.