.jpg)
thumb|Space Shuttle Discovery|Space Shuttle Discovery
thumb|Space Shuttle Discovery|Space Shuttle Discovery
A spaceplane is a vehicle that can fly and glide as an aircraft in Earth's atmosphere and function as a spacecraft in outer space. To do so, spaceplanes must incorporate features of both aircraft and spacecraft. Orbital spaceplanes tend to be more similar to conventional spacecraft, while sub-orbital spaceplanes tend to be more similar to fixed-wing aircraft. All spaceplanes as of 2024 have been rocket-powered for takeoff and climb, but have then landed as unpowered gliders.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).