Aero-Thermo-Structural Trade-Off Studies for Hypersonic Transport Gliders based on the DLR SpaceLiner Concept

The Space Launcher Systems Analysis Group SART of the German Aerospace Center DLR has been working for several years on developing a novel hypersonic passenger transportation concept. The SpaceLiner, originally proposed in 2005, is a two staged, rocket propelled and vertical take-off transportation system designed for a 90 minutes Europe-Australia reference mission carrying 50 passengers. The SpaceLiner has gone through several design cycles, with the most recent configuration SpaceLiner7-3 currently under definition. Various papers on the vehicle design as well as design of individual subsystems have been published over the years. One important finding was the high level of interdependency of the different technical disciplines and subsystems within a large design space, which on the one hand complicates the identification of optimum design solutions, while on the other hand offering unexpected performance increase potentials. Therefore, the work presented in this paper will leave the baseline configuration of the SpaceLiner and perform parametric system studies on a broader level. The aim is to identify and quantify interactions and interdependencies within the design space in order to provide design improvements for a potential future SpaceLiner configuration, as well as for vehicles of this class in general. Thereby, this work will investigate the design task on a pure parametric way due to the high complexity of the problem. An automated system analysis loop is utilized, but no multi-disciplinary optimization procedures will be applied. The parametric studies are still in progress, with first results being presented in this paper.