Lifting body
[1] The lifting body had been imagined by 1917, in which year an aircraft with something like a delta wing plan form with a thick included fuselage was described in a patent by Roy Scroggs.
[citation needed] Aerospace-related lifting body research arose from the idea of spacecraft re-entering the Earth's atmosphere and landing much like a regular airplane.
Initial tests were performed by towing the M2-F1 along a dry lakebed at Edwards Air Force Base California, behind a modified Pontiac Catalina.
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.
[citation needed] The HL-10 attempted to solve part of this problem by angling the port and starboard vertical stabilizers outward and enlarging the center one.
Nonetheless, the lifting body concept has been implemented in a number of other aerospace programs, the previously mentioned NASA X-38, Lockheed Martin X-33, BAC's Multi Unit Space Transport And Recovery Device, Europe's EADS Phoenix, and the joint Russian-European Kliper spacecraft.
The Dream Chaser is a suborbital and orbital[8] vertical-takeoff, horizontal-landing (VTHL) lifting-body spaceplane being developed by Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC).
In the summer of 1983, an Israeli F-15 staged a mock dogfight with Skyhawks for training purposes, near Nahal Tzin in the Negev desert.
The engineers at McDonnell Douglas had a hard time believing the story of the one-winged landing: as far as their planning models were concerned, this was an impossibility.
[13] Failing to be selected for a CCDev phase 2 award by NASA, Orbital announced in April 2011 that they would likely wind down their efforts to develop a commercial crew vehicle.
The US government developed a variety of proof-of-concept and flight-test vehicle lifting body designs from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s at Armstrong Flight Research Center.
Gerry Anderson's 1969 Doppelgänger used a VTOL lifting body lander / ascender to visit an Earth-like planet, only to crash in both attempts.
His series UFO featured a lifting body craft visually similar to the M2-F2 for orbital operations ("The Man Who Came Back").
In the Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space computer game, a modified X-24A becomes an alternative lunar capable spacecraft that the player can choose over the Gemini or Apollo capsule.
The 1970s television program The Six Million Dollar Man used footage of a lifting body aircraft, culled from actual NASA exercises, in the show's title sequence.
The scenes included an HL-10's separation from its carrier plane—a modified B-52—and an M2-F2 piloted by Bruce Peterson, crashing and tumbling violently along the Edwards dry lakebed runway.
