Analisi e sviluppo del corridoio di rientro di un velivolo Two-Stage-To-Orbit = Development and Analysis of Two-Stage-To-Orbit Re-entry Corridor Requirements

Since the first Wright Brothers flight, there has been a continuous development of new kinds of vehicles to make airplane transportation safer, faster, and cheaper. The last of these innovative projects is Stratofly, financed by the European Union, a new type of civil aircraft two-stage to orbit. Stratoflay, in the next future, is going to carry passengers from Bruxelles to Sydney in just a few hours. It will be possible thanks to the high cruise altitude in the outer atmosphere and the Mach 8 speed reached. From this kind of concept, it is possible to evolve new varieties of vehicles TSTO with many different mission profiles. This paper aims to build high-level requirements for a second stage atmosphere re-entry, studying the re-entry corridor, the correlation with take-off requirements, and determining the best trade-off between landing and take-off requirements. The study starts with a statistical analysis of similar vehicle performances. The following step is building the re-entry corridor for a given aircraft and payload weight obtaining attitude parameters for the descending slope. If landing parameters conflict with take-off ones, an optimizing cycle solves the critical issues. In the end, all the parameters are collected in a matching chart which provides information on the design point.