G. Russo, C. Voto
DOI Number XXX-YYY-ZZZ
Conference Number HiSST-2022-29
The mid-to-long term perspectives of suborbital hypersonic spaceplanes require the availability of ultra-fast,
winged vehicles, characterized by low wing loading, streamlined fuselages, sharp nose and wing leading
edges, able to manoeuvre along flight trajectories at small angles of attack. From another point of view,
the cost associated with sub-orbital space access flight is strongly conditioned by the still small dimension
of its market and accessibility to critical technologies. Therefore, hypersonic technologies suitable for this
market as well as for point-to-point fast transportation can facilitate the endeavour.
HYPLANE is a HTHL Mach 4.5 bizjet-size aerospaceplane conceived by Trans-Tech and University Federico
II of Naples and under study within the industrial-academic ecosystem of the Campania Aerospace District
(DAC), believing it to be more affordable than larger hypersonic airplanes and with a larger dual-use market.
HYPLANE has the aim to offer very fast suborbital flight for space tourism, microgravity experimentation
and training, and also shortening time to connect two airports within the door-to-door scenario. The concept
is based on the access to stratospheric altitudes (30+km) and suborbital flights as safe as today’s
commercial air transportation by integrating state-of-the-art enhanced aeronautics and space technologies.
Essentially, HYPLANE is mostly based on already relatively high TRL technologies which guarantees a
sufficiently short time to market.
The low wing loading configurations and designed ability to manoeuvre along the flight trajectories at small
angles of attack, allow HYPLANE to guarantee accelerations and load factors of the same order as those
characterizing the present civil aviation aircraft (FAA/EASA specifications). Thanks to its technical features,
it may operate from/to more than 5000 airports all over the world even using short runways to take-off and
land, which for point-to-point business aviation is paramount. Furthermore, characteristics such as small
dimension, configuration and high cruising altitude determine reduced noise in the airports surrounding and
low sonic boom impact on ground. These conditions will further facilitate not only the development of the
commercial use of such kind of transportation mean, but also its social acceptability.
With the aim to validate the developed technologies on a multi-mission flying vehicle embarking leadingedge aviation and space technologies, a demonstrator is proposed.
DAC is parallelly supporting the development of Grazzanise military airport to become an experimental
spaceport, within the frame of the promoted development of the Suborbital Experimental Polygon to be
established between Campania and Sardinia regions, and including PISQ (inter-forces polygon of Salto di
Quirra). This Suborbital Experimental Polygon will make available the perfect operational scenario where to
test and make use of the supersonic/hypersonic demonstrator.
This paper intends to update the status of the HYPLANE project as reported in [1]