Saga of a Flying Bathtub

Before Project Mercury, NACA — the predecessor of NASA — was working on space vehicles that could fly without wings. The wings were deemed too hard to protect from the heat of reentry, so the goal of this effort was to define a vehicle whose body would provide the lift and control normally provided by wings, thus giving it some ability to choose an alternate landing site.

Although, for complicated reasons, ballistic reentry vehicles were ultimately chosen, work on lifting bodies continued until 1975. Now, there's a chance it may be revived.

The father of the lifting body concept was Alfred Eggers of NASA Ames. Its champion in the U.S. was Dale Reed. As an aeronautical engineer at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, Reed built, tested and documented several different designs. A team at NASA Langley also made major contributions, and there was strong Air Force interest in the technology.

Over those twelve years from 1963 to 1975, lifting bodies flew at speeds from Mach 24 down to subsonic, and all the flight-test objectives were successfully met. Yet it was hard to keep NASA headquarters interested in such small programs. The ultimate result was that an operational spacecraft using the lifting body concept is still a dream.