In January 1974, the first of ninety-nine episodes of a new TV series aired in the USA for the first time. The show opened with footage of the test flight of an experimental plane going awry. The pilot, Colonel Steve Austin, struggles to regain control of the machine without success. “I can’t hold her,” he says, “she’s breaking up.” Austin barely survives the subsequent crash and is critically injured. No matter, announces the voice-over. “We can rebuild him. We have the technology.” Fitted with an atomic-powered bionic arm, eye, and legs, Austin is turned into a superman, The Six Million Dollar Man.
Sadly, the technology wasn’t available to save the right eye of the test pilot flying the MF-F2 plane, whose real crash featured in the TV show. Instead, after suffering a fractured skull, severe facial injuries, and a broken hand when his aircraft tumbled like a rolling log across a dry lake bed, NASA pilot Bruce Peterson lost the sight in his eye to infection.
Peterson had been part of a test program researching the flying characteristics of what were called “lifting bodies,” wingless aircraft that relied on the shape of the fuselage alone to generate lift.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a series of eight different lifting-body designs were tested in the hope that they might provide the basis of a tough, controllable, and reusable re-entry vehicle from space.
At the beginning of the space program, NASA opted for the simplicity, safety, and relatively low cost of a heat-shielded blunt capsule that splashed down in the ocean beneath a parachute. The lifting bodies, machines that shared some of the characteristics of both capsules and winged aircraft, looked to offer an alternative. And they did. Over twelve years, the program progressed from wooden gliders towed behind a Pontiac to rocket-powered flights at altitudes of up to 90,000 feet. Peterson’s crash was the only serious accident in what was an enormously successful research program that paved the way toward the design of the Space Shuttle.
In the end, the requirements of the US Air Force meant that the final Shuttle design had to have wings (so that it had the gliding range to avoid the possibility of having to land anywhere the US didn’t want it to). However, the lifting body concept didn’t die with the end of the original program in 1975.
In 1982, an Australian Navy P-3 patrol plane took photographs of the Soviet Union recovering its own sub-scale lifting-body design from the Indian Ocean after a sub-orbital test flight. NASA was so impressed that it copied it for a new lifting-body design called the HL-20. A mock-up was built and studies conducted, but like its Soviet progenitor, the HL-20 project was strangled by a lack of funds. Nonetheless, the story doesn’t end in 1991. Intriguingly, that Soviet design, via the HL-20, has since re-emerged as the blueprint for the privately developed Dream Chaser shuttle. Awarded development funds by NASA in 2012, the updated spaceplane has begun preliminary flight testing.
Like Steve Austin, it seems that the lifting-body concept is going to emerge “Better . . . stronger . . . faster.” Although at a cost, it has to be said, of rather more than $6 million.
Look, no wings. The Northrop HL-10 lifting body on the dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base after landing. Test pilot Bill Dana watches as Balls 8, the NASA NB-52 mothership that carried him to altitude before release, flies overhead.
