The HL-20 Personnel Launch System was a circa 1990 NASA

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...

 spaceplane

Spaceplane

A spaceplane is a vehicle that operates as an aircraft in Earth's atmosphere, as well as a spacecraft when it is in space. It combines features of an aircraft and a spacecraft, which can be thought of as an aircraft that can endure and maneuver in the vacuum of space or likewise a spacecraft that...

 concept for manned orbital missions studied by NASA's Langley Research Center

Langley Research Center

Langley Research Center is the oldest of NASA's field centers, located in Hampton, Virginia, United States. It directly borders Poquoson, Virginia and Langley Air Force Base...

 in Hampton, Virginia

Hampton, Virginia

Hampton is an independent city that is not part of any county in Southeast Virginia. Its population is 137,436. As one of the seven major cities that compose the Hampton Roads metropolitan area, it is on the southeastern end of the Virginia Peninsula. Located on the Hampton Roads Beltway, it hosts...

. HL-20 was envisaged as a lifting body

Lifting body

A lifting body is a fixed-wing aircraft configuration in which the body itself produces lift. In contrast to a flying wing, which is a wing with minimal or no conventional fuselage, a lifting body can be thought of as a fuselage with little or no conventional wing...

 re-entry vehicle based on the Soviet BOR-4

BOR-4

The BOR-4 flight vehicle is a scaled prototype of the Soviet Spiral VTHL spaceplane. An unmanned, subscale craft, its purpose was to test the heatshield tiles and reinforced carbon-carbon for the Buran space shuttle, then under development...

 spaceplane design featuring low operational costs, improved flight safety, and a possibility of landing on conventional runways. No flight hardware was ever built.
With increasing national interest in obtaining routine access to space, a number of Earth-to-orbit transportation systems were being studied in the mid-1980s.