Rational and affordable concepts of Landing Gear for small reentry vehicle demonstrators

The paper proposes an innovative solution for landing gear of small space vehicles, in particular of technological demonstrators of reentry space vehicles. After explaining why small space vehicles can benefit from landing gears, the work investigates a solution, which avoids the use of fluidic systems and minimizes constraints on the whole vehicle, thus limiting cost raising and making the installation of the landing gear easier on vehicles that originally did not envisage landing gears.