The growing interest in reusable space transportation systems has renewed the focus on horizontal landing capabilities for re-entry vehicles. While parafoil-assisted recovery remains a widely studied and applied method, particularly for small-scale or experimental platforms, current trends in aerospace engineering and spaceflight operations emphasize the need for autonomous runway landings to improve operability, reusability, and mission flexibility. Within this context, lifting-body and winged configurations are increasingly regarded as viable solutions, although the minimum aerodynamic and performance requirements for their final approach and landing remain insufficiently defined. This thesis addresses this gap by developing a methodology to identify the fundamental requirements that a re-entry vehicle must satisfy— in terms of L/D ratio, L/W ratio, and other aerodynamic performance metrics—to successfully perform a controlled horizontal landing on a runway without the need for parafoil systems.