8 TH EUROPEANCONFERENCE FOR AERONAUTICS AND AEROSPACE SCIENCES (EUCASS) DOI: ADD DOINUMBER HERE System Identification and Testing for a VTVL vehicle Ana-Maria Neculaescu ⋆ , Alexandru Marin ⋆ , Adrian Toader ⋆† , Alexandru-Gabriel Persinaru ⋆ , Alexandru-Mihai Cismilianu ⋆ ,Mihai Tudose ⋆ , Camelia-Elena Munteanu ⋆ , Ionel Popescu ⋆ , Hans Strauch ⋆⋆ and Stephane Dussy ⋆⋆⋆ ⋆ National Institute for Aerospace Research Elie Carafoli - INCAS Bucharest, Romania, 061126 ⋆⋆ Airbus DS GmbH Bremen, Germany, 28361 ⋆⋆⋆ ESA HQ-Daumesnil Paris, France, 75015 neculaescu.ana@incas.ro · toader.adrian@incas.ro † Corresponding author Abstract There is a shift of perspective and paradigm when it comes to space technologies through the space com- munity by the recovery and reusability of several components of a vehicle. A consequence of this new way of doing things is the rising number of companies and institutes that are in the race to demonstrate and validate some key technologies related not only to recover and potentially reuse of some parts of space vehicles, but also from being able to test faster, provide reliability through previous proven procedures for technology maturation. INCAS is a part of this race by designing and developing a testing platform in the frame of ESA - FLPP3, called Demonstrator for Technologies Validation - DTV. This platform is a turbojet engine powered vehicle which can be considered as a test bench with the goal to mature the technologies under evaluation, both software and hardware, to a higher TRL. The purpose of this article is to present the testing platform itself, the testing plan and procedures, together with the results of the sub-system testing. An efficient, incremental and innovative way to perform sub-system testing coupled with an inter-disciplinary process elaboration in order to achieve this goal is to be presented in this paper. 1. Introduction At this moment, in Europe and worldwide, there is a huge interest in the development of reusable systems. The immediate goal of this project is to build a turbojet engine flying (VTVL) vehicle, able to perform an autonomous low speed, low altitude flight. The vehicle can be viewed as test bench to mature the technologies under evaluation (software and hardware) to the TRL which involves flight tests. Technology readiness depends on the rapid maturation of innovative concepts. One of the reasons for its slow adoption is high costs involved with in-flight demonstration. Flying payloads of launcher technology components (software and hardware) on the proposed technology demonstrator can increase the speed of development. The main reason for the conservatism is of course the high penalty of failure. Therefore, a demonstrator (or a family of demonstrators), where a risk can be taken more easily, plays an important role in order to increase confidence into new techniques and designs. The step from a pure simulation-based assessment to one based on hardware-in-the-loop is a true test on the robustness of a new, advanced design. An in-flight platform allows demonstration of the real-world applicability of the envisaged techniques within a controlled risk/low penalty environment. The demonstrator will be reusable and will allow a fast turn-around cycle of testing, design and upgrade. Although the emphasis of the flight experiments is guidance, navigation and control related, it is not limited to this. A payload capability is foreseen in order to allow testing of new equipment with the intention to operate it in a specified dynamic environment, which is provided via certain trajectories flown by the demonstrator. 2. DTV design approach The approach taken for the design of the reusable testing platform is iterative and based on the interaction of the disciplines involved, as presented in the picture below. Copyright © 2019 by INCAS. Published by the EUCASS association with permission. DOI: 10.13009/EUCASS2019-925