High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The HL-20 Personnel Launch System was a circa 1990 NASA spaceplane concept for manned orbital missions studied by NASA`s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. HL-20 was envisaged as a lifting body re-entry vehicle that was loosely based on the Soviet BOR-4 spaceplane design. Its stated goals were to achieve low operational costs, improved flight safety, and a possibility of landing on conventional runways. No flight hardware was ever built. This vehicle was inspired by the Soviet project Spiral.