Flying Flatiron

Some 45,000 ft. above the Southern California desert last week, a B-52 bomber cut loose the strange cargo tucked under its wing. Freed from the mother ship, a gleaming but cumbersome aluminum shape that looked like a huge inverted flatiron dived toward what seemed to be sure destruction on the earth below.

Suddenly the steep plummeting dive changed to a semblance of flight. Under control of Veteran NASA Test Pilot Milton Thompson, the experimental M2-F2 "lifting body" demonstrated an uncanny ability to maneuver. Wingless and powerless, the 21-ton, 22-ft.-long craft swung through two 90DEG turns as it dropped through its rapid descent. At the last moment it lifted its nose, lowered its tricycle landing gear and streaked to a spectacular 200-m.p.h. landing on the flatbed of Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base. By successfully executing its unusual 217-second flight, the M2-F2 pointed the way for a future generation of wingless spacecraft that will be agile enough to land safely at large airports, thus enabling them to be used repeatedly for trips into space.

Flight without wings--which are useless "in space and would be burned and torn away by the temperatures and stresses of re-entry--is made possible by the M2-F2's odd aerodynamic shape, which provides substantial lift in a fast-flowing airstream. Two sturdy rudders enable the craft to turn, and small flaps can be used to pitch its nose up or down. With such controls, a lifting body returning to the atmosphere from orbit at 18,000 m.p.h. might start on a trajectory designed to terminate near Kansas City, and still have the capability of flying to a landing at any point within the continental U.S.

NASA Project Director John McTigue says that the first practical use of a lifting body will probably be to serve as a ferry carrying scientists and supplies to and from permanent orbiting laboratories. Long before that happens NASA will have to complete a series of increasingly ambitious experimental flights. In the future, a version of the M2-F2 will be equipped with an X-15 rocket plane engine and sent to an altitude of 80,000 ft. at a speed of 1,200 m.p.h. before starting its powerless descent. As more funds become available, a piloted lifting body with a heat shield will be launched from Cape Kennedy atop a Titan rocket. It will make a suborbital flight from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, then re-enter the atmosphere for a controlled landing at Edwards Air Force Base.

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