Walter "Whitey" Whiteside, who was a retired Air Force maintenance officer working in the FRC's Flight Operations Division, was a dirt-bike rider and hot-rodder. To do that, it had to handle the 400-pound pull of the M2-F1. This vehicle needed to be able to tow the M2-F1 on the Rogers Dry Lakebed adjacent to NASA's Flight Research Center (FRC) at a minimum speed of 100 miles per hour. The first flight tests of the M2-F1 were over Rogers Dry Lake at the end of a tow rope attached to a hopped-up Pontiac convertible driven at speeds up to about 120 mph. It featured a plywood shell placed over a tubular steel frame crafted at Dryden. It would look like a "flying bathtub," and was designated the M2-F1, the "M" referring to "manned" and "F" referring to "flight" version. In 1962, Dryden management approved a program to build a lightweight, unpowered lifting body as a prototype to flight test the wingless concept. The absence of wings would make the extreme heat of re-entry less damaging to the vehicle. The wingless, lifting body aircraft design was initially conceived as a means of landing an aircraft horizontally after atmospheric reentry. Three of them crashed, but in each case the pilot ejected from the vehicle successfully. The M2-F1 ejection seat was later used in the two Lunar Landing Research Vehicles and the three Lunar Landing Training Vehicles. On the first firings, the test was unsuccessful, but on the final test the dummy in the seat landed safely. To test the ejection seat, the Flight Research Center's Dick Klein constructed a plywood mockup of the M2-F1's top deck and canopy. The project selected the seat used in the T-37 as modified by the Weber Company to use a rocket rather than a ballistic charge for ejection. The M2-F1 was fitted with an ejection seat before the airtow flights began.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |