Reusable Launch Vehicle

Reusable Launch Vehicles are technology from the live-action film continuity family.

Reusable Launch Vehicles or RLVs are a development on the part of Hyperdynamix. About the size of a pickup truck, they can be crewed by up to three astronauts, however their onboard AI is sophisticated enough that they can fly themselves, so a human crew isn't needed for most tasks. The AI is intelligent enough to improvise, being programmed for over twenty-seven thousand situations.

Fiction

Classified novels

At the time when NEST visited Hyperdynamix, three RLVs had been constructed, with another two on the way. RLV-1 was docked with HODDIS and being used as part of the station's publicly stated purpose to clean up orbital junk. RLV-2 and RLV-3 were in preparation to launch, the former carrying a satellite that would broadcast a signal to wipe out Cybertronians worldwide, and the latter carrying orbital weapons to defend the satellite.

Reverb hitched a ride into space on RLV-2 in the process of trying to stop the satellite from launching, and Gears and Kevin Bowman followed in RLV-3. They managed to disable the satellite, and Kevin returned to Earth in RLV-3, however before the ship could land, he disabled the autopilot so he could land near a Cybertronian cylinder which was his only chance of rescuing his brother from an alien world. The cylinder triggered, transporting the RLV and Kevin to Blue Planet, and the RLV was left behind when the boy managed to return to Earth. Satellite of Doom