Feb 082011
Been dealing with more exciting health issues lately, thus the blog slowdown. In the meanwhile, please to enjoy this cutaway artwork:
6 Responses to “HL-10 & M2 Lifting Body Artwork”
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Been dealing with more exciting health issues lately, thus the blog slowdown. In the meanwhile, please to enjoy this cutaway artwork:
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Where did these two lifting bodies end up at the end of their careers, anyway?
According to wiki… The HL-10 is is on display at the entrance of the Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards. The M2F2 shown here was made famous by being shown each week crashing at the start of “The Six Million Doller Man”. The test pilor invovlved, who survived, just ‘loved’ it. /sarcasm. They rebuilt it into the the M2F3 varient with a third fin and is hanging in the Air&Space Museum in DC.
“We have the technology,we can rebuild him,we have the technology to build the world’s first bionic man”.
I found the imdb version of that line:
[Opening narration.]
Oscar Goldman: Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.
I admire what computer modelling has done for the engineering proper, but I enjoy seeing hand-wrought works of art like this just the same.
Jim
These drawings were provided by the contractor, Northrop and when I asked Dryden Flight Research Center (NASA at Edwards AFB Base) resident eyewitness and historian Dill Hunley about them, he didn’t have a clue. I had seen them in one of those old 1960’s “Time-Life” books on air & space as a child and knew I wasn’t imaginging things. Turns out these pictures never got to NASA origin is in-house at Northrop preceding the construction of the planes, each for about $2,000,000 reusing as much as possible existing parts such as landing gear off of decommissioned fighter planes. At my website I will soon post a blog on this very subject. After being dropped by a crane in a San Diego Science Museum the nose of the HL-10 had to be replaced – by volunteers and yes it is now on a pedestal at Dryden’s main gate. The M-2/F2 which I also will link to a video in my blog crashed and was repaired and is now with the addition of better cockpit protection and a center fin the M-2/F3 which flew many times with the XLR-11 rocket engine after the crash and is now in the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Museum somewhere between the Capitol Building and the Apollo 11 and Friendship 7 capsules.