page_title: Lifting body
section_title: Popular culture
hierarchical_section_title: Lifting body / Popular culture
caption_attribution_description: English: FMX-4 Facetmobile homebuilt aircraft, photographed from above in flight, showing shape and flat panel structure. From NASA LARC NAG-1-03054 "Feasibility Study of the Low Aspect Ratio All All-Lifting Configuration as a Low-Cost Personal Aircraft". Report available from NASA or the study authors: Barnaby Wainfan and Hans Neiubert, at URL: http://www.wainfan.com/pavreport.pdf Copied from report PDF, converted to PNG, and uploaded on October 24, 2006 by George William Herbert.
context_page_description: A lifting body is a fixed-wing aircraft or spacecraft configuration in which the body itself produces lift. In contrast to a flying wing, which is a wing with minimal or no conventional fuselage, a lifting body can be thought of as a fuselage with little or no conventional wing. Whereas a flying wing seeks to maximize cruise efficiency at subsonic speeds by eliminating non-lifting surfaces, lifting bodies generally minimize the drag and structure of a wing for subsonic, supersonic and hypersonic flight, or spacecraft re-entry. All of these flight regimes pose challenges for proper flight safety.
  Lifting bodies were a major area of research in the 1960s and 70s as a means to build a small and lightweight manned spacecraft. The US built a number of lifting body rocket planes to test the concept, as well as several rocket-launched re-entry vehicles that were tested over the Pacific. Interest waned as the US Air Force lost interest in the manned mission, and major development ended during the Space Shuttle design process when it became clear that the highly shaped fuselages made it difficult to fit fuel tankage.
context_section_description: Lifting bodies have appeared in some science fiction works, including the movie Marooned, and as John Crichton's spacecraft Farscape-1 in the TV series Farscape. The Discovery Channel TV series conjectured using lifting bodies to deliver a probe to a distant earth-like planet in the computer animated Alien Planet. Gerry Anderson's 1969 Doppelgänger used a VTOL lifting body lander / ascender to visit an Earth-like planet, only to crash in both attempts. His series UFO featured a lifting body craft visually similar to the M2-F2 for orbital operations ("The Man Who Came Back"). In the Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space computer game, a modified X-24A becomes an alternative lunar capable spacecraft that the player can choose over the Gemini or Apollo capsule.
  The 1970s television program The Six Million Dollar Man used footage of a lifting body aircraft, culled from actual NASA exercises, in the show's title sequence.  The scenes included an HL-10's separation from its carrier plane—a modified B-52—and an M2-F2 piloted by Bruce Peterson, crashing and tumbling violently along the Edwards dry lakebed runway. The cause of the crash was attributed to the onset of Dutch roll stemming from control instability as induced by flow separation.
caption: Wainfan Facetmobile FMX-4 homebuilt lifting-body aircraft, photographed from above in flight
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