Lifting Body
Lifting body construction is referred to an aircraft, wherein the lift is not produced, or not only by wings, but substantially by a specially formed hull. Such a design offers due to their opposite winged concepts higher stability and thus simpler and more economical construction for about spaceplane to.
Development
The sliders research arose from the idea of a spaceship that lands in the Earth's atmosphere like a normal plane to the re-entry. It had wings need to be built that could withstand the pressures and temperatures in extreme supersonic flight. One possible answer was to completely omit the wing and fuselage design must be such that it generates lift. The space shuttle, the slider includes some principles, although it is constituted mainly on the concept of the delta wing.
The development of wingless lifting body began with Dale Reed of the Dryden Flight Research Center NASA. Early models like the M2 -F1 were made of wood. 1963 saw NASA as part of the Dyna- Soar program with rocket-propelled models that were dropped from a B - 52 bomber to experiment. Another similar approach was the HL -10, which was developed in the NASA Langley Research Center. The X-24 was based on the M2 concept, which was from Dr. A. Eggers from NASA Ames Research Center. The M-2 competed with the design of the Space Shuttle.
A big problem with these designs was the stall (german air flow separation ): Downstream of the air flow was very turbulent, resulting in a loss of control and buoyancy. In the HL -10 was trying to solve a part of this problem by the fact that you declined the outer port and starboard fins of the tail to the outside and the middle fin was enlarged.
On the Soviet side began in 1965 with a lifting -body developments that led to the Mikoyan -Gurevich MiG -105 and Bor -4, which was later abandoned in favor of the Buran program. In 2000 it was almost in the Russian Federation with Kliper to this development, presented the work but 2007 seems to get one.
A large part of the population has never experienced anything of this glider models until they saw the Man 1970s television series The Six Million Dollar. They showed a M2 F2 was flown by Bruce Peterson as crashes and looped over the runway. The pilot survived, and the aircraft was rebuilt as the M2 -F3.
That, to date, last lifting -body project of NASA was the X-38/CRV, a joint development together with ESA, DLR and other European companies. The Crew Return Vehicle should serve as a rescue spacecraft for the International Space Station (ISS) and can evacuate the crew of the space station completely in an emergency. The development of the CRV was discontinued in 2001 for lack of funds.
A completely new concept for a lifting - body aircraft, the Swiss Conrad sheep Roth developed. His Smartfish is not based on the principle of bird flight, but takes the tuna as a model. The advantage of this construction is to be that there is no more complicated computing is required to maintain the aircraft stable in the air, but that this is solely ensured by the structure itself.