Флейм о копировании образов авиатехники

In Dream Chaser’s past is the intriguing story of how the idea for the HL-20 came to Langley in the first place. On June 3, 1982, as the Cold War was winding down, a Royal Australian P-3 Orion reconnaissance plane was patrolling in the Indian Ocean, near the Cocos Islands, when it saw a Soviet ship struggling to capture an object in the water and bring it aboard.

That object, the BOR-4, was an unmanned prototype spacecraft used to test heat-shield ideas for what the Soviets envisioned would be their space shuttle program. As the space plane bobbed in the ocean, cameras aboard the P-3 captured the scene.

“It really was a ‘Keystone Kops’ thing,” said Del Freeman, then an engineer at Langley and involved in a NASA program to develop a space taxi at the time. He also was one of the few at the center then with a high enough security clearance to view the pictures brought to Hampton by U.S. intelligence agents.

Pictures of the BOR-4, both in the water and also being hauled aboard the ship, showed an approximate center of gravity that proved to be a starting point for Langley to “reverse engineer” an 11-inch cherrywood model that underwent helium tests in some of the center’s wind tunnels. (Using helium makes high-speed testing at room temperature possible.)

More models—some bigger—were built and more tests were made. Eyes were opened.

“From day one, the thing had excellent entry characteristics, from Mach 20 down to high transonic speeds,” Freeman said.

“The characteristics were really good.”

More tests showed that the plane had a natural trim point and needed little control surface deflection to remain stable. Wing-like fins along each side of the craft acted as a nozzle, forcing air onto a short, vertical tail.

“We realized that that little, teeny tail was in a high-dynamic position so that [it] could be smaller,” Freeman said.

More tests were carried out, and the Langley engineers saw the influence of an earlier American craft, the HL-10, on the Soviet design. It had been part of NASA’s “lifting body” program that began in the 1950s, then went out of vogue when the agency-adopted the Space Shuttle configuration in the 1970s.

The HL-20 was funded for tests, including some involving human access and egress in which NASA’s first chief technologist, Bobby Braun—then a young engineer—took part. But money waned, along with interest in a space taxi. It took some maneuvering to get funding for students from North Carolina State and North Carolina A&T to build the wooden model that Sirangelo and others from SpaceDev found in Langley’s hangar that day in 2005.

 

NASA - The Dream Chaser: Back to the Future

Building on decades of research by NASA and the Soviets, a private company is designing a new crew vehicle.By Jim Hodges // web.archive.org