Feb 012011
The HL-10 may have been a single-seat reasearch vehicle of quite small dimensions, but that doesn’t mean that nobody had bigger ideas for it. Take, for instance, McDonnell Douglas’ ILRV (Integral Launch and Re-entry Vehicle) design from 1969, an immediate predecessor to the Space Shuttle porogram. This particular design used a two stage fully reusable vehicle, with the upper “shuttle” stage being an overgrown HL-10. The shuttle would have had substantial interior propellant storage space; the final Shuttle did not, as all the propellant was stored in an expendable external tank.
6 Responses to “HL-10 Diagrams: Extra Large Edition”
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The HL-10 nearly got an orbital ride if a book about the history of lifting bodies is to be believed. It would be carried up in the Saturn-V in place of a LM and if that went okay a 2nd flight would have the pilot ride her down to land at Edwards.
THX again for Picture
on Lifting Body on Rocket
also Northrop M2-F3 had to fly on Titan II, so the proposal
but at life goes, it never happend…
There’s a few urban’ish legends that the X-24 lifting body had a C model built for some deep black hypersonic tests.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Winchell Chung, Armagh Planetarium. Armagh Planetarium said: Another fascinating but unbuilt space project. http://su.pr/2h0X3b […]
In the second picture, the ‘com antenna’ looks like a man standing on the roof.
I can see they wanted simple, effective components but putting a guy upstairs to hold the rabbit ears?
That’s “Commander Antenna,” the square-jawed heroic leader of the expedition.