HOTOL
Hotol ( Ho rizontal T AKE o ff and Landing Satellite L auncher ) was a project of 1984 a British -bodied aircraft , the horizontal with air-breathing engines should start. The model was a space glider study originally designed by Eugen Sänger and later named after him , on which the Junkers company had worked from 1961 to 1974. HOTOL was to be 62 m long, have a wingspan of 19.7 m, weigh 196 tons and be able to carry a payload of seven tons into a low earth orbit . The European Space Agency (ESA) preferred the much simpler Hermes project .
Some of the developers of HOTOL founded the company Reaction Engines and developed a successor called Skylon with a new engine and modern materials, which was supposed to transport up to twelve tons of payload to the ISS or into orbit very cheaply, but its development was also canceled.