Lifting Body Candidates Tested at Edwards Air Force Base

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR, launched the world’s first artificial satellite on October 4, 1957, Sputnik-1 — a larger than beach ball sized polished sphere — this was a shock that chagrined scientists and engineers in the United States. The U.S. had attempted to be the first to launch a satellite using the Vanguard rocket in late 1956, but failed and this turned out to generate an international political and public relations debacle. We were, after all, involved in the space race. Scientists and engineers don’t often get very excited, disturbed, or disrupted from their dedicated work by these kinds of situations, but they do when the politicians suddenly become willing to fund their favorite projects. This was exactly the situation that was brewing in the United States toward the late mid-decade of the 20th century.

We can get an idea of where the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA — the forerunner of NASA) and the USAF were directing their efforts by reviewing the paper titles and list of attendees of their 1958 NACA Conference on High-speed Aerodynamics: A Compilation of Papers Presented (ref. 1). This was a large conference, at Ames Aeronautical Laboratory (later Research Center or ARC), that included general subjects concerning manned and piloted reentry satellites and vehicles into planetary atmospheres. They presented various topics related to:

1) The ballistic capsule type characterized by use of drag alone for entry deceleration;
2) The semi-ballistic vehicle that uses lift to reduce peak deceleration and a degree of aerodynamic flight-path and ground track control; and
3) The so called winged vehicles, those that are capable of more efficient aerodynamic flight.

Shown below are examples of the three types of entry vehicles hypothesized. The capsule, a segmented nose cone — lifting body, and a delta winged vehicle (Fig. 1).

Although very successful, the ballistic capsule parachute recovery approach has left much to be desired, especially if it involved open-sea recoveries. In addition, it had little to no terminal area maneuvering capability and fewer orbit selections for a specific landing site. If the semi-ballistic and winged configurations were to be controlled by a pilot, the question posed was: How would such a program be initiated, launched and expanded to provide adequate information to support a firm basis for an actual orbital program? Who would be the advocates?

Fig. 2 is presented to show the Earth’s surface area, footprint, available for potential lifting body landing sites for a given orbit compared with that of ballistic capsules — in this case a Mercury or Gemini capsule off the east coast of Florida (ref. 2). It can be seen for the capsules, that only a small geographical area is available for splash-down recovery while a lifting body has the entire western United States available for a horizontal landing.

With the political and technical pressure of an unofficial space-race in full swing, it seemed that toward the early 1960s the time was right for even bolder steps to be taken and for more elegant ways to return from orbital flight, and the stage seemed to be perfectly set for NASA Flight Research Center (FRC) to institute such programs to investigate a variation of the lifting body and winged vehicles for piloted controlled terminal area research programs at Edwards AFB. It would be risky and somebody in higher authority would have to put his or her reputation or more on . . .