![]() ![]() ![]() The M2-F1 was soon nicknamed the "Flying Bathtub". Since the M2-F1 was a glider, a small rocket motor was added in order to extend the landing envelope. Later the craft was towed behind a C-47 and released. Initial tests were performed by towing the M2-F1 along a dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base California, behind a modified Pontiac Catalina. The first full-size model to come out of Reed's program was the NASA M2-F1, an unpowered craft made of wood. Dale Reed of NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center. NASA's refinements of the lifting body concept began in 1962 with R. The Martin Aircraft Company X-24 built as part of a 1963 to 1975 experimental US military program A proposed solution eliminated wings altogether: design the fuselage body itself to produce lift. However, the vehicle's wings would have to be designed to withstand the dynamic and thermal stresses of both re-entry and hypersonic flight. A steerable spacecraft with wings could significantly extend its landing envelope. Following atmospheric re-entry, the traditional capsule-like spacecraft from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo series had very little control over where they landed. ![]() Īerospace-related lifting body research arose from the idea of spacecraft re-entering the Earth's atmosphere and landing much like a regular aircraft. However at low airspeeds the lifting body is inefficient and did not enter mainstream airplane design. The lifting body was conceived as long ago as 1917, when something like a Delta Wing Plan Form with a thick included fuselage was described in a patent by Roy Scroggs. 5 List of Armstrong Flight Research Center lifting body vehicles (1963 to 1975).In 2015 the ESA Intermediate eXperimental Vehicle performed the first ever successful reentry of a lifting body spacecraft. The Dream Chaser lifting-body spaceplane, an extension of HL-20 technology, was proposed as one of three vehicles to potentially carry US crew to and from the International Space Station, but eventually was selected as a resupply vehicle instead. Examples include the HL-20 Personnel Launch System (1990) and the Prometheus spaceplane (2010). Interest waned as the US Air Force lost interest in the crewed mission, and major development ended during the Space Shuttle design process when it became clear that the highly shaped fuselages made it difficult to fit fuel tankage.Īdvanced spaceplane concepts in the 1990s and 2000s did use lifting-body designs. The US built a number of lifting body rocket planes to test the concept, as well as several rocket-launched re-entry vehicles that were tested over the Pacific. Lifting bodies were a major area of research in the 1960s and 70s as a means to build a small and lightweight crewed spacecraft. All of these flight regimes pose challenges for proper flight safety. Whereas a flying wing seeks to maximize cruise efficiency at subsonic speeds by eliminating non-lifting surfaces, lifting bodies generally minimize the drag and structure of a wing for subsonic, supersonic and hypersonic flight, or spacecraft re-entry. 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. American-made X-24A, M2-F3 and HL-10 lifting bodiesĪ lifting body is a fixed-wing aircraft or spacecraft configuration in which the body itself produces lift. ![]()
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