concepts produced by these studies, there were clear needs to accumulate practical flight experience with reentry systems, as well as to maintain and expand upon international cooperation in the fields of space transportation, exploration, and science. Out of these desires emerged the Future Launchers Preparatory Programme (FLPP), an ESA-headed initiative conceived and championed by a number of its member states, which provided a framework for addressing the challenges and development of the technology associated with reentry vehicles. It was recognised that, in order for significant progress to be made, FLPP would require the production and testing of a prototype reentry vehicle that drew on their existing research, technologies, and designs. By adopting a step-by-step approach using a series of test vehicles prior to the development of a wider series of production vehicles, this approach was seen to reduce the risk and to allow for the integration of progressively more sophisticated developments from the early relatively-low-cost missions. In line with this determination, during early 2005, the Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle (IXV) project was formally initiated by the Italian Space Agency and the Italian Aerospace Research Centre under an Italian programme named PRIDE (Programme for Reusable In-orbit Demonstrator in Europe) Their main industrial contractor was Next Generation Launcher Prime SpA (NGLP) in Italy. The latter organisation is a joint venture entity comprising two major European aerospace companies, Astrium and Finmeccanica. The PRIDE programme had the support of various national space agencies, including the European Space Research and Technology Centre, Italian Space Agency (ASI), French space agency CNES, and Germany's DLR; by November 2006, the IXV was supported by 11 Member States: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Of these, Italy emerged as the principal financial backer of the IXV programme. Selection and pre-launch testing The IXV project benefitted from and harnessed much of the research data and operational principles from many of the previously conducted studies, especially from the successful Atmospheric Reentry Demonstrator (ARD), which was test-flown during 1998. Early on, during the mission definition and design maturity stages of the project, thorough comparisons were conducted again between existing ESA and national concepts against shared criteria, aimed at evaluating the experiment requirements (technology and systems), programme requirements (technology readiness, development schedule and cost) and risk mitigation (feasibility, maturity, robustness, and growth potential). The selected baseline design, a slender lifting body configuration, drew primarily upon the CNES-led