The Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) is a European Space Agency (ESA) experimental suborbital re-entry vehicle. It was developed to serve as a prototype lifting body orbital return vehicle to validate the ESA's work in the field of reusable orbital return vehicles. The European Space Agency has a program called Future Launchers Preparatory Programme (FLPP), which made a call for submissions for a reusable spaceplane. One of the submissions was by the Italian Space Agency, that presented their own Programme for Reusable In-orbit Demonstrator in Europe (PRIDE program) which went ahead to develop an initial test vehicle, Pre-X, followed the prototype named Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) and the consequential Space Rider that inherits technology from its prototype IXV. On 11 February 2015, the IXV conducted its first 100-minute suborbital space flight, successfully completing its mission upon landing intact on the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The vehicle is the first ever lifting body to perform full atmospheric reentry from orbital speed. Past missions have flight tested either winged bodies, which are highly controllable but also very complex and costly, or capsules, which are difficult to control but offer less complexity and lower cost. Development Background During the 1980s and 1990s, there was significant international interest in the development of reusable launch platforms and reusable spacecraft, particularly in respect to spaceplanes, perhaps the most high-profile examples of these being the American Space Shuttle and Soviet Buran programmes. The national space agencies of European nations, such as France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) and Germany's German Aerospace Center (DLR), worked on their own designs during this era, the most prominent of these to emerge being the Hermes spaceplane. Development of the Hermes programme, which was backed by the European Space Agency (ESA) for several years, was ultimately terminated in 1992 prior to any flights being performed in favour of a partnership arrangement with the Russian Aviation and Space Agency (RKA) to use the existing Soyuz spacecraft instead. While work on the development of the Hermes vehicle was cancelled during the early 1990s, the ESA maintained its strategic long-term objective to indigenously develop and eventually deploy similar reusable space vehicles. Accordingly, in support of this goal, the ESA embarked upon a series of design studies on different experimental vehicle concepts as well as to refine and improve technologies deemed critical to future reentry vehicles. In order to test and further develop the technologies and