Lifting Body - History

History

Aerospace-related lifting body research arose from the idea of spacecraft re-entering the Earth's atmosphere and landing much like a regular aircraft. Following atmospheric re-entry, the traditional capsule-like spacecraft from the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo series had very little control over where they landed. A steerable spacecraft with wings could significantly extend its landing envelope. 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 proposed solution eliminated wings altogether: design the fuselage body itself to produce lift.

NASA's refinements of the lifting body concept began in 1962 with Dale Reed of NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center. The first full-size model to come out of Reed's program was the NASA M2-F1, an unpowered craft made of wood. Initial tests were performed by towing the M2-F1 along a California dry lakebed at present-day Edwards Air Force Base, behind a modified Pontiac Catalina. Later the craft was towed behind a C-47 and released. Since the M2-F1 was a glider, a small rocket motor was added in order to extend the landing envelope. The M2-F1 was soon nicknamed the "Flying Bathtub".

In 1963, NASA began programs with heavier rocket-powered lifting-body vehicles to be air launched from under the starboard wing of a NB-52B, a derivative of the B-52 jet bomber. The first flights started in 1966. Of the Dryden lifting bodies, all but the unpowered NASA M2-F1 used an XLR-11 rocket engine as was used on the famous Bell X-1. A follow-on design designated the Northrop HL-10 was developed at NASA Langley Research Center. Air flow separation caused the crash of the Northrop M2-F2 lifting body. The HL-10 attempted to solve part of this problem by angling the port and starboard vertical stabilizers outward and enlarging the center one.

Starting 1965 the Russian lifting-body Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-105 or EPOS (Russian acronym for Experimental Passenger Orbital Aircraft) was developed and several test flights made. Works ended in 1978 when the efforts shifted to the Buran program, while work on another small-scale spacecraft partly continued in the Bor program.

The IXV is a European Space Agency lifting body experimental re-entry vehicle intended to validate European reusable launchers which could be evaluated in the frame of the FLPP program. The IXV is scheduled to make its first orbiting flight in 2013, launched by a Vega rocket.

Orbital Sciences proposed a commercial lifting-body spaceplane in 2010. The Prometheus is more fully described below.