Look familiar? (Image: ESA)

Three, two, one, lift-off! The countdown has immortalised launches as the most exciting part of space travel, but reaching orbit is only half the challenge. Re-entering Earth’s atmosphere is just as difficult, and can be deadly, as it proved for the unfortunate crew of the doomed space shuttle Columbia. Now the European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing to try re-entry for the first time in 16 years, using a novel spacecraft.

I am in an Italian industrial estate on the outskirts of the old Roman city of Turin to see this craft, the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle or IXV, prepare for its first planned launch later this year.

If the IXV turns out to be successful, it could be a major turning point for Europe’s presence in space. Re-entry is key for more advanced space missions, whether that be returning experiments from the International Space Station (ISS), bringing back rock samples from the moon and Mars, or anything involving humans. “There is no way Europe can put a man in something heading back to Earth without this technology,” says ESA’s Giorgio Tumino, the IXV programme manager.


ESA is currently dependent on Russia to carry its astronauts into orbit and back. And though ESA did successfully launch, and return to Earth, a copy of a NASA Apollo capsule in 1998, that vehicle did not get used again and the project was abandoned.

Hybrid perfection

The first thing I think when I see IXV is that it looks like someone chopped the nose off NASA’s space shuttle and stuck a pair of flippers on the back (see picture, above right). Soon I discover that, to some extent, that is what they did.

Most vehicles capable of resisting the immense friction and heat of atmospheric re-entry are capsules with no means of controlling where they land once descent begins – think NASA’s Apollo missions or the Dragon capsule made by California company SpaceX. The shuttle, with its ability to land like a plane, was a complex and costly exception. The IXV, a vehicle classed as a “lifting body”, is a cross between the two. “Lifting bodies are a hybrid,” says Tumino. “It has the simplicity of a capsule, because we do not have wings, but the performance is very close to winged vehicles.”

I don a fetching hair net, lab coat and plastic slippers and enter the cleanroom where IXV is being assembled. Set to weigh in at 2 tonnes once complete and roughly the size of a car, it is currently suspended on one side as if in the middle of a barrel roll. Lacking the protective covering that will shield it during its mission, a mess of wires spills out from every electronic pore. Visible are its all-important parachutes, tightly packed and ready to burst open and slow the craft’s decent.

Space for a stowaway

Though IXV could pave the way to Europe’s first independent astronaut mission, the craft before me is a scaled-down prototype. Peering inside, I reckon there’s just enough space for a curled-up stowaway, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Instead of being a people carrier, this craft is designed to test two technologies vital to future missions: a heat shield and two rear flaps that move up and down to provide manoeuvrability. When it launches in October from Kourou in French Guiana it will reach an altitude of 412 kilometres – about the same as the ISS – and fly almost entirely round the planet before re-entry. The craft is robotic and will adjust its trajectory on the way to splashdown to within a 20-kilometre-diameter circle in the Pacific Ocean, where a ship will be waiting to recover it.

If that test is successful, ESA hopes to build a new space craft that exploits the IXV technology. With bureaucratic wrangles ahead, it is not clear what form that craft will take, but a space plane that is based on the IXV but lands on the ground like an aeroplane, not in water, would fit the bill, and could be built within three years, says Tumino. It would not be crewed to start off with, but it would be able to refuel and could be used to maintain satellites and carry out microgravity experiments at much lower cost than on the ISS.

US looms large

As far as the technology goes, the closest comparison to this futuristic space plane is theX-37, a classified US military project that launches on a rocket and lands by itself on a runway. ESA insists there are no plans to militarise IXV, so its successor would be the only civilian example of such a vehicle.

Even at the heart of Europe’s space effort, though, the US’s dominance in space looms large. At the other end of the cleanroom are four cylinders, each large enough to swallow IXV whole and still have room for more. These are the cargo modules of Cygnus capsules, which belong to US firm Orbital Sciences, the other private firm that resupplies the ISS besides SpaceX.

The modules are built here in Turin on contract and shipped to the US for full assembly and launch. Cygnus and IXV are not directly comparable – Cygnus is designed to burn up on re-entry – but it is an instant reminder of just how far ahead the US is. Tumino hopes IXV will give ESA the boost it needs to start to catch up.

The European Space Agency paid for New Scientist‘s flights and hotel in Turin