An Australian man and his 12-year-old son are hoping to make history with the development of the smallest spacecraft able to re-enter Earth's atmosphere and land safely.

Robert Brand is the developer of the craft, named ThunderStruck, that he said filled a niche predicted to be important to future space research.

Mr Brand described the craft as a small winged re-entry vehicle capable of leaving Earth's orbit and flying around the solar system, at least as far as Mars or the near-Earth asteroids.

"The work that we see for this space vehicle can be extremely varied, either military or going out and collecting samples and returning," he said.

"It doesn't collect the samples itself, it just meets up with a survey vehicle that can load in a full capsule which we return to Earth."

Mr Brand said what made ThunderStruck unique was that it could fly up and back for basic experiments without going into orbit or it could fly into orbit on board a rocket then re-enter, something that was not being done anywhere else.

"There's only one other winged vehicle at this time, in the US military," he said.

"It's just returned from a two-year trip around the Earth but we don't know what it did."

ThunderStruck would be able to land with more precision than larger craft, if testing goes as expected.

Mr Brand, who lives in Sydney, said Project ThunderStruck had the backing of Australian government bodies and universities.

"ThunderStruck is on the cards to be a fully working spaceship in about five years," he said.

"But it has to go through a number of concept testing phases to be accepted before we spend the money to actually build the thing in earnest."

12-year-old in line to fly test craft

Jason Brand recovering payload cameras, with father Robert in the background ( Jason and Robert Brand )

Another unique aspect of Project ThunderStruck would be the involvement of Mr Brand's 12-year-old son Jason in the first phase of testing.

Scheduled for April, the transonic testing phase would attempt to test the 2.5-metre craft at speeds close to mach 2, faster than the speed of sound.

Mr Brand said his son worked with him releasing and bringing back high-altitude balloons from the stratosphere and had considerable expertise in space technology, in spite of his young age.

"To his mind it was simple, even if to others it was rather complex," Mr Brand said.

"He wants to fly that remote-controlled flight from 45 kilometres.

"This is the first stage, which is testing going through the sound barrier.

"It's one of those things where he flies remote control aircraft all the time and this is just going to be a bigger version of that.

"We expect to get up to about 2,000 kilometres per hour, so it'll be a truly supersonic glider he'll have at his control."

Mr Brand said the next testing phase would be in 2016 testing the craft's re-entry from space on a sounding rocket.

In search of history ... Robert Brand ( Robert and Jason Brand )

The final phase, in about six years, would be the re-entry from orbit and the guided landing into a location likely to be in outback Queensland near Longreach.

He said the smaller the space vehicle the less chance there was of instability.

The developer's aim was to find the smallest possible size the craft could be without it burning up on re-entry.

Mr Brand said if the project came together it would be unique and give Australia a much-needed boost in space development.