Preliminary Safety Assessment for a VTOL hypersonic transportation system aimed at performing parabolic flights

This paper proposes a methodology for the safety assessment suitable for the conceptual design phase, especially conceived to support the design of very innovative transportation systems. In particular, this paper provides the readers with an innovate integrated approach that allows the engineers to perform high-level safety evaluations, usually carried out exploiting incidents statistics that are clearly not currently applicable for new aerial vehicles such as spaceplanes. In particular, this article proposes the safety assessment of a single-stage hypersonic spaceplane aimed at performing parabolic suborbital flights and equipped with a dual propulsion system that can enable it to perform vertical take-off and landing in non-tail-sitting position