Dr.Zooch
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I'm starting this thread to help seperate the lifting bodies event from the D-12 Blow out event.
At the next MDRA launch (August 2007) I'll be doing a lot of intresting flying of my lifting bodies- here's a brief from the other thread on the history of my lifting bodies:
It's actually a design that I started working on back in 1973. I refined it in 1975 and my first balsa sticks and tissue paper version, called the Stuller lifting body a name derived from that of a cute brunette I was chasing at the time (who could not have cared less about me by the way) flew that year. It took a long time to get the angles right and get it to fly. Keep in mind that I knew little about aerodynamics at the time- and almost nothing about how lifting bodies worked. I had seen a photo of an M2-F2 and perhaps read a paragraph about it, but that was pretty much all. (The Freeland Michigan high school library was not exactly a rich source of aerospace material.) What I reasoned was that a lifting body would slide along through the air rather than drop through it hey for kid like me, that was pretty abstract. Once I made the design sail, I scaled down the tissue paper version and piggy-backed it on a rocket similar to my Titan IIIC kit of today. When I launched it, however, the tissue paper blew out and the stick frame came tumbling back. That same year I submitted the design of the booster, the lifting body and the pad with service tower and... believe it or not... a mobile swinging service structure very much like that built for the actual shuttle by NASA, as a part of a take-home project for my 11th grade drafting class. That was about 4 years before work began on the Space Shuttle service structures- so Id never seen the swinging service structure! It was just one of those strange coincidences- heck I just thought it was a cool idea. Anyhow, my drafting teacher came up and asked me to tell him about the design, so I did. He asked, pointing at the lifting body, "...and what's this?" I told him it was a wingless glider. He just quietly walked away. I got the project back and it was a B- with the notation "I thought you'd know that gliders can't fly without wings." and a red arrow pointing toward the lifting body. Hey... at least he didn't write "You'll shoot your eye out!"
In the spring of 1977 I started work on the lifting body again- this time I made it out of sheet balsa. Only problem was that no matter how I ballasted it- it wanted to fly upside down! The solution... flip it over and put the fins on the other side and call the bottom the top! I renamed it the CRV for (Crumman Research Vehicle- CRV another title stolen by NASA years later *doh*!) I painted it red and black to resemble the XRV from Marooned. The first one was launched on its designed booster, but the booster was mis-ballasted and it cartwheeled. The lifting body flung clear, but the booster was wrecked. The next one was an up-scaled version and, believe it or not, was launched aboard an Estes 1284 Space Shuttle booster. That one left the rod, pitched over a bit more than 90 degrees and plowed full speed into a plowed field. I salvaged a single SRB nosecone- everything else was trashed. Then on August 15, 1977 my stock Estes Orbital Transport booster successfully lofted the smaller version of the lifting body. In my notes it says that the lifting body glided just as good as the OTs stock glider- and that says a lot! That was the last rocket I flew 25 years, because just a few days after the flight I packed up and moved away to college to learn how to pilot the real stuff and gave up model rockets.
Following my years spent strapped into the nose of assorted flying machines, I found myself in the model rocket business and have been trying to bring back some of my projects from my weird youth to aid me in being a weird adult. One of the things I want to develop most into a kit is the CRV lifting body, which BTW is the star in my cartoon strip The Program found at klydemorris.com. What Im struggling with is finding the right booster to do it justice and be a good build in a kit. This August at the MDRA launch (25th and 26th) weather permitting, Im going to be shooting all different sizes of the Crumman lifting body doing all sorts of stuff just to celebrate the anniversary of that first flight back in 1977. If or not it is out in kit form by then depends more on the US Patent office than anything else, however.
A few years ago, a pal of mine who works at NASA Dryden took one of my lifting bodies in and showed it to the late Dale Reed, the father of lifting bodies. He thought it was terrific and said it was also a pretty interesting hypersonic shape. Not bad for something designed by a teenager 3 decades ago.
At the next MDRA launch (August 2007) I'll be doing a lot of intresting flying of my lifting bodies- here's a brief from the other thread on the history of my lifting bodies:
It's actually a design that I started working on back in 1973. I refined it in 1975 and my first balsa sticks and tissue paper version, called the Stuller lifting body a name derived from that of a cute brunette I was chasing at the time (who could not have cared less about me by the way) flew that year. It took a long time to get the angles right and get it to fly. Keep in mind that I knew little about aerodynamics at the time- and almost nothing about how lifting bodies worked. I had seen a photo of an M2-F2 and perhaps read a paragraph about it, but that was pretty much all. (The Freeland Michigan high school library was not exactly a rich source of aerospace material.) What I reasoned was that a lifting body would slide along through the air rather than drop through it hey for kid like me, that was pretty abstract. Once I made the design sail, I scaled down the tissue paper version and piggy-backed it on a rocket similar to my Titan IIIC kit of today. When I launched it, however, the tissue paper blew out and the stick frame came tumbling back. That same year I submitted the design of the booster, the lifting body and the pad with service tower and... believe it or not... a mobile swinging service structure very much like that built for the actual shuttle by NASA, as a part of a take-home project for my 11th grade drafting class. That was about 4 years before work began on the Space Shuttle service structures- so Id never seen the swinging service structure! It was just one of those strange coincidences- heck I just thought it was a cool idea. Anyhow, my drafting teacher came up and asked me to tell him about the design, so I did. He asked, pointing at the lifting body, "...and what's this?" I told him it was a wingless glider. He just quietly walked away. I got the project back and it was a B- with the notation "I thought you'd know that gliders can't fly without wings." and a red arrow pointing toward the lifting body. Hey... at least he didn't write "You'll shoot your eye out!"
In the spring of 1977 I started work on the lifting body again- this time I made it out of sheet balsa. Only problem was that no matter how I ballasted it- it wanted to fly upside down! The solution... flip it over and put the fins on the other side and call the bottom the top! I renamed it the CRV for (Crumman Research Vehicle- CRV another title stolen by NASA years later *doh*!) I painted it red and black to resemble the XRV from Marooned. The first one was launched on its designed booster, but the booster was mis-ballasted and it cartwheeled. The lifting body flung clear, but the booster was wrecked. The next one was an up-scaled version and, believe it or not, was launched aboard an Estes 1284 Space Shuttle booster. That one left the rod, pitched over a bit more than 90 degrees and plowed full speed into a plowed field. I salvaged a single SRB nosecone- everything else was trashed. Then on August 15, 1977 my stock Estes Orbital Transport booster successfully lofted the smaller version of the lifting body. In my notes it says that the lifting body glided just as good as the OTs stock glider- and that says a lot! That was the last rocket I flew 25 years, because just a few days after the flight I packed up and moved away to college to learn how to pilot the real stuff and gave up model rockets.
Following my years spent strapped into the nose of assorted flying machines, I found myself in the model rocket business and have been trying to bring back some of my projects from my weird youth to aid me in being a weird adult. One of the things I want to develop most into a kit is the CRV lifting body, which BTW is the star in my cartoon strip The Program found at klydemorris.com. What Im struggling with is finding the right booster to do it justice and be a good build in a kit. This August at the MDRA launch (25th and 26th) weather permitting, Im going to be shooting all different sizes of the Crumman lifting body doing all sorts of stuff just to celebrate the anniversary of that first flight back in 1977. If or not it is out in kit form by then depends more on the US Patent office than anything else, however.
A few years ago, a pal of mine who works at NASA Dryden took one of my lifting bodies in and showed it to the late Dale Reed, the father of lifting bodies. He thought it was terrific and said it was also a pretty interesting hypersonic shape. Not bad for something designed by a teenager 3 decades ago.
Interesting smoke trails going up.
