The Virtual SpacePlane

The paper discusses the Virtual SpacePlane, a virtual prototype of the US Air Force's Manned SpacePlane, which operates in a realistic distributed virtual environment. The Manned SpacePlane (MSP) project is in the initial stages of evaluating the benefit of using military spaceplanes for a variety of low-earth orbit and atmospheric missions. The baseline assumption for the MSP project is that we will need to achieve safe, reliable, affordable, and routine access to space for short notice and worldwide deployment of space assets in the near future.