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“NASA Langley Research Center worked on the lifting body design in the Full Scale Tunnel starting in 1963 (test 267) and 1967 (test 273). The HL-10 design from Langley Research Center was very successful and led to the decisions in the final design of the Space Shuttle. Refinement of the HL-10 is know as the HL-20. This video focuses on the newer design.”
NEW VERSION with improved video & sound:
Public domain film from NASA, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
The HL-20 Personnel Launch System was a circa 1990 NASA spaceplane concept for manned orbital missions studied by NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. HL-20 was envisaged as a lifting body re-entry vehicle that was loosely based on the Soviet BOR-4 spaceplane design. Its stated goals were to achieve low operational costs, improved flight safety, and a possibility of landing on conventional runways. No flight hardware was ever built. This vehicle was inspired by the Soviet project Spiral…
Legacy
The Dream Chaser spacecraft is based on the HL-20 lifting body design. It was developed by SpaceDev for the 2004 Commercial Orbital Transportation Services competition, and is now being developed by Sierra Nevada Corporation for the Commercial Crew Development program (CCDev).
Orbital Sciences Corporation has also proposed an HL-20 derivative for the second round of CCDev funding, the Prometheus spacecraft.
Both vehicles are proposed to launch unfaired atop a man-rated Atlas V launch vehicle…
The Dream Chaser is a crewed suborbital and orbital vertical-takeoff, horizontal-landing (VTHL) lifting-body spaceplane being developed by Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) Space Systems. The Dream Chaser design is planned to carry up to seven people to and from low earth orbit. The vehicle would launch vertically on an Atlas V and land horizontally on conventional runways…
Prometheus was a proposed manned vertical-takeoff, horizontal-landing (VTHL) spaceplane concept put forward by Orbital Sciences Corporation in late 2010 as part of the second phase of NASA’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program…
Failing to be selected in NASA’s CCDev phase 2 program, Orbital Sciences announced in April 2011 that they will likely wind down their efforts to develop a commercial crew vehicle…
The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-105 was a manned test vehicle to explore low-speed handling and landing. It was a visible result of a Soviet project to create an orbital spaceplane. This was originally conceived in response to the American X-20 Dyna-Soar military space project and may have been influenced by contemporary manned lifting body research being conducted by NASA’s Flight Research Center in California. The MiG 105 was nicknamed “Lapot” Russian: лапоть, or bast shoe (the word is also used as a slang for “shoe”) for the shape of its nose…
While the X-20 Dyna-Soar was designed for launch atop a conventional expendable rocket such as the Titan III-C or Saturn I, Soviet engineers opted for a midair launch scheme for Spiral. Known as “50 / 50”, the idea was that the spaceplane and a liquid fuel booster stage would be launched at high altitude from the back of a large, airbreathing mothership travelling at hypersonic speeds. The idea was similar to that used by the United States in launching the D-21 Tagboard reconnaissance drone from the back of the A-12 Oxcart. The mothership was to have been built by the Tupolev Design Bureau (OKB-156) and utilize many of the same technologies developed for the Tu-144 ‘Charger’ supersonic transport (The Soviet equivalent of the Concorde) and the Sukhoi T-4 mach-3 bomber (somewhat similar to the XB-70 Valkyrie). It never made it off the drawing boards. The U.S. purportedly flew a similar design in the 1990s under the secret Blackstar project…
