Aeronautics: Flying Flatiron

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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 90° 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.