- 6 weeks ago
For educational purposes
In the 1920s, aircraft designers began searching for ways to incorporate the powerful propulsion of rockets into their flying machines.
Efforts to harness and control rocket propulsion resulted in many failures but also some dramatic successes.
Featured Aircraft:
- NASA Saturn V Rocket
- North American X-15
- Martin Marietta X-24
- NASA M2-F1
- NASA Space Shuttle
- NASA Gulfstream jet modified as a Space Shuttle landing simulator
In the 1920s, aircraft designers began searching for ways to incorporate the powerful propulsion of rockets into their flying machines.
Efforts to harness and control rocket propulsion resulted in many failures but also some dramatic successes.
Featured Aircraft:
- NASA Saturn V Rocket
- North American X-15
- Martin Marietta X-24
- NASA M2-F1
- NASA Space Shuttle
- NASA Gulfstream jet modified as a Space Shuttle landing simulator
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:01Hi, I'm Neil Armstrong. Join me for an adventure through time.
00:56In the 1920s,
00:59as usable rockets became available,
01:02aircraft designers began searching for ways to incorporate this
01:06powerful source of propulsion into their flying machines.
01:10Efforts to harness and control rocket propulsion
01:13resulted in many failures, but also
01:17some dramatic successes. This was the beginning of a new class of machines,
01:22the rocket airplane.
01:30Rockets are basically heat engines
01:33that burn combustible material using the resultant gas or propulsion.
01:38The idea is as simple as a firecracker,
01:41but early development of controllable rockets had its ups and downs.
01:49While American physicist Robert H. Goddard worked secretly firing off the world's first liquid-fuel rocket,
01:56major developments were taking place in Germany.
01:59On September 30th, 1929, German motor industry tycoon Fritz von Oppen was the first man to fly a rocket-powered
02:08aircraft,
02:09actually a glider. It reached a speed of 95 miles per hour with its 16 solid-fuel rockets.
02:16We financed the development of the aircraft itself.
02:24Germany's first successful practical use of rockets was to assist the takeoff of propeller-driven aircraft.
02:31The initial 1937 experiments in an HE-112 piston engine flight were directed by Ernst Heinkel and rocketry legend Wernher
02:40von Braun.
02:41They developed booster rockets of various sizes, some so powerful they were used to help giant gliders loaded with military
02:48armament into the air.
02:54Research continued and led to the development of the first operational rocket-propelled interceptor, the ME-163 comet,
03:03which went into service before the end of World War II.
03:12The comet could reach attacking bombers twice as fast as they could reach their target.
03:17It had a major weakness. The comet, having expended its fuel, was the proverbial sitting duck on its glide back
03:25home.
03:33Nazi leaders devoted huge sums of money to Dr. Wernher von Braun's research team.
03:38They wanted to build on the work of Eugen Sanger and Irene Brett,
03:42who theorized that rocket-propelled spacecraft could orbit the Earth and then bombard targets.
03:51When Brown built the secret Penamunda Experiment and Testing Center on the Baltic coast,
03:56out of it came the world's first ballistic rocket missile, the deadly and destructive V-2.
04:02Its first flight was October 3, 1942.
04:21It was designed to carry a one-ton warhead, 170 miles.
04:30Between 1944 and 1945, more than 4,000 V-2s were launched to bombard England.
04:38Von Braun and many of his teams surrendered to Americans as the Allies entered Germany.
04:44Working for the U.S., Wernher von Braun saw many of his visions become reality.
04:49Train loads of captured V-2s were used to begin the American rocket program, with Von Braun at the controls.
04:56Peacetime testing of the V-2s led to more powerful American rockets, like the Redstone, the Jupiter,
05:03and the huge, powerful Saturn V, which propelled Apollo into orbit.
05:12From the early X program, America learned about aerodynamic heating, protecting the pilot at high altitudes,
05:19how to use reaction control thrusters, and the development of reusable rocket motors.
05:25Research in the 40s and 50s led engineers to envision two modes of space travel, and both were explored.
05:32One was to boost a man in a capsule, into space, using a conventional rocket.
05:37A capsule would then drop back for an ocean pickup.
05:44The other was the idea of a winged rocket plane, that could elegantly glide back to her.
05:50The X-15 was developed as the premier research vehicle, which flew to the edge of space.
05:58The X-15 was designed for hypersonic flight, five times the speed of sound and beyond.
06:03It would test stability and controls at speeds and altitudes never before attained in manned flight.
06:10The X-15 would travel higher and faster than any other winged aircraft, more than 67 miles high, at 4
06:18,520 miles per hour.
06:21And its flight tests would demonstrate that it was possible for a pilot to function in a weightless environment,
06:27and fly a winged re-entry from space.
06:42Well, we're here at the NASA installation at Edwards in the pilot's locker room with Bill Dana.
06:50Bill's a legendary test pilot, research pilot, and one that flew here when this was the high-speed flight station,
07:01because this was one of the few places in the country where really high-speed flight was occurring.
07:06And they were using rocket airplanes, and Bill's had some rocket experience.
07:10So, Bill, you flew the X-15 a lot of times.
07:15What were the sensations of getting dropped off the B-52 wing and lighting up the engine?
07:20You only fell off the wing at zero gravity.
07:24You weren't actually fired off the wing, you fell off.
07:27But it never failed to feel, to me, like I'd been fired off the wing and was at much less
07:32than zero gravity.
07:34The gladdest I ever was was when the engine finally lit, and I could get some positive Gs on the
07:40airplane and get it pointed back up.
07:42One of the problems with the X-15 was that it didn't have an autopilot in it to keep it
07:47pointed down the flight path.
07:50If we stayed in the atmosphere, we had air flowing over the tail surfaces, which kept the airplane weather-veined
07:57into the flight path.
07:59But as we got out of the atmosphere, there was no air to flow over the tail surfaces.
08:04And then the pilot was the only thing that was keeping the airplane pointing down the flight path.
08:09There were no G-forces as you started your re-entry. You were out basically in space.
08:15And then maybe at 180,000 feet, we'd feel the Gs start to build up, and then build up to
08:21one G, say, at 130,000 feet.
08:24And then we built them up to five Gs, and held five Gs, because that was about all the pilots
08:31wanted to pull in the recovery.
08:33And it usually took 10 to 15 seconds at five Gs to break the fall and get back into the
08:39equilibrium flight.
08:40So pull out of the steep dive.
08:41That's exactly right. We were coming in steep, and we wanted to fly back to the airport shallow.
08:45So we had to put a lot of Gs on the airplane for a long time to break that rate
08:50of descent.
08:50Did you have a lot of confidence about getting back to the runway and being able to land where you
08:56wanted to land the airplane without power?
08:57It turned out I did. On my first X-15 flight, that was my big apprehension that somehow I would
09:04not be able to land the airplane power off.
09:06But I had, of course, practiced that landing maybe two or three hundred times in jet fighters.
09:12And it turned out that was the easiest part of the first flight.
09:15Things happened so fast at Mach 4, which is how fast I went on my first flight, that I was
09:20way behind the airplane until it slowed down.
09:22And then as we got down toward Mach 1, I said, hey, I've been there before.
09:26And the landing, as one would say, was a piece of cake.
09:34In the early 60s, the X-15 became a laboratory for trans-atmospheric and near-space research.
09:41It carried experiments encompassing a variety of subjects, including ultraviolet stellar photography and micrometeorite collection.
09:50It was used to test new celestial navigation systems supporting America's Apollo program.
09:56It even carried experimental insulation aloft for the Apollo's Saturn V rocket.
10:03The X-15 was not part of America's space program.
10:07Instead, as a research vehicle, it made invaluable contributions to the knowledge and know-how needed for space flight.
10:18To find a way to put larger, reusable spacecraft into operation, experiments were commissioned to study various alternatives.
10:28One, the lifting body design, looked at the possibility of wingless flight, an aircraft without conventional wings, where lift was
10:37provided by the form of the fuselage.
10:40Flight tests demonstrated that the lifting body design had merit and could work.
10:46This X-24B was the last rocket airplane in the test program.
10:54The first lifting body was the first aircraft ever built by NASA itself.
10:59Ironically, it was probably the cheapest aircraft ever built by the government, just $30,000.
11:07The M2-F1 was made of a tubular plane and plywood.
11:12Money for it came out of the building maintenance fund, because the lifting body idea was not readily accepted.
11:19It was the brainchild of NASA's Dale Reed, who had trouble making NASA believe in the concept and getting funding
11:26for it.
11:27With radio-controlled models, he had to prove that the funny-looking thing could fly.
11:32He was on a hunt with a perfect shape, one that could stand hypersonic speeds, make the transition to sonic
11:40and subsonic speeds, and then land conventionally, a precursor to the shuttle orbiter.
11:48The first flight tests were unconventional.
11:51The lifting body was towed behind a souped-up Pontiac convertible loaded with scientists.
11:56The M2-F1 did not fly well.
12:00After wind tunnel and ground testing, Milt Thompson piloted the craft as it was towed aloft by a C-47
12:07cargo aircraft, then cut loose at 10,000 feet.
12:15It and the other lifting bodies to come glided like an X-15 at very steep angles.
12:21The M2-F1 had serious stability problems.
12:24So did its successors, the M2-F2 and F3.
12:31The first lifting body that we flew that was a high-speed lifting body was the M2-F2, and it
12:37had some very bad lateral handling qualities at low angle of attack.
12:41And indeed, on several flights, we had lateral oscillations due to pilot over control.
12:49We had wing rock that varied from 30 degrees plus or minus up to 90 degrees plus or minus.
12:57Yeah, it was a little ropey.
12:58And the only solution for it was to get the angle of attack back, and then this oversensitivity would disappear.
13:05And this was a design deficiency which was eventually designed out of the M2 shape.
13:11The M2-F3 had a third vertical fin which inflated the ailerons equally and did away with the lateral oscillation.
13:20But the M2-F2, the first high-speed manned flight version, was very, very sensitive in role.
13:32The next generation, HL-10, was much easier to fly, incorporating lessons learned from earlier models.
13:40On May 9, 1969, it was the first lifting body to reach supersonic speeds under the command of NASA test
13:47pilot Bill Dana.
13:49He took it to an unpowered landing at Edwards Air Force Base.
13:53NASA later equipped it with a rocket for landing, but it was learned unpowered landings were easier for the pilot.
14:00That knowledge would be transferred to the space shuttle, which makes routine, powerless landings under the pilot's control.
14:16The next manned lifting body was the X-24A, a stubby-looking craft that had a tendency to nose up
14:23when firing the engine.
14:25Engineers redesigned it and came up with the X-24B, but handled better than its sophisticated chase aircraft.
14:33On August 5, 1975, test pilot John Mankey descended from a B-52 launch of 60,000 feet in the
14:41X-24B.
14:42He landed precisely on the designated runway spot, proving concrete airfield landings were tested.
15:13The space shuttle brings together an array of technological advances in aviation.
15:21Launched vertically, its attitude while in space is controlled by 44 small rocket thrusters.
15:28And like its predecessors, the German Comet, the X-15, and the lifting body, the shuttle lands like a glider,
15:36here on this dry lake at Edwards, California, or near its launch site in Florida.
15:45The U.S. space shuttle is correctly referred to as a winged orbiter.
15:52Columbia made the first shuttle orbital flight April 12, 1981, piloted by John Young and Robert Critt.
16:01Its solid fuel boosters were the first ever to be used in a manned space flight.
16:10The orbiter weighs in at 100 tons on takeoff.
16:14Liquid hydrogen and oxygen mix from the giant booster tank to the shuttle's three engines.
16:21That tank is 15 stories high.
16:24Eight seconds before launch, thousands of gallons of water are used to dampen vibrations from the engine's noise.
16:31That's to protect its wings, tail, and payload.
16:36The main shuttle engines develop 1.2 million pounds of thrust.
16:40That's not enough to make it go anywhere.
16:43The two additional solid fuel reusable boosters add 5.2 million pounds more,
16:50four times the thrust of the liquid fuel engines.
16:53The solid fuel rockets are jettisoned at 28 miles high when their fuel is gone.
16:59Just six minutes after launch, the orbiter is traveling at Mach 15.
17:05Its two ohms engines ignite to bring it to 17,500 miles per hour and orbit.
17:13Shuttle pilots are generally at the mercy of computer control on the trip up.
17:18For the next portion of the voyage, the shuttle pilot maneuvers the craft with its 44 onboard reaction control thrusters.
17:27The only way the shuttle can return to Earth is to re-enter the atmosphere and glide back like an
17:33X-15 and lifting bodies before it,
17:35making a dead stick landing.
17:37They've heard the sonic boom at Edwards.
17:43Once in the atmosphere, it slows down from hyperspeed by making a series of steep esters, rolling as much as
17:5090 degrees in each direction.
17:55A shuttle pilot has only one chance to get the landing right.
17:59There's no room for error.
18:02Even after maximum slowdown, it's still a 100-ton glider doing 200 miles an hour and dropping like a flying
18:10rock.
18:11It does have a certain amount of lift and good handling characteristics.
18:16Although the shuttle has autopilots that could land it flawlessly,
18:20NASA has always preferred that the human pilot do it.
18:23That came from X aircraft experience, in particular the X-15.
18:29Were it not for pilots, many of its flights would have ended in disaster.
18:36In NASA's in-flight simulator, pilots can make landing after landing with controls and a view just like that in
18:43the shuttle.
18:44NASA uses a modified Gulfstream business jet, specially configured to land like the orbiter,
18:50but with the safety of jet engines set at idle.
18:54Neil Armstrong went along to see how it's done.
18:57NASA astronaut Hoot Gibson, search pilot Roger Zweig.
19:04Generally, as you're coming in, you really can't see over the nose, you can't see out in front of you.
19:10It's kind of like being on final on a tail dragger.
19:12And the change in pitch attitude between about Mach 5 and subsonic is really pronounced.
19:21We prefer to fly the thing down in automatic attitude control all the way down,
19:26so the automatic system is flying in for us.
19:29And then we don't take it over until we're subsonic.
19:32.95 is where we'll come in and take control stick steering.
19:36About what altitude are you when you go up sometime?
19:39We are usually around, where are we Roger, around 40,000 or so.
19:44Yeah, probably 45.
19:45Yeah.
19:4645,000.
19:47In that area.
19:48We like to have more than 180 degrees around the hack.
19:53And if we can, we'll target for 350 degrees around the hack.
19:59So that just gives us more time and more energy.
20:03If we start to go low, we can retarget to a different runway.
20:06Or we can do, instead of a 350 degree left turn, perhaps a 180 degree right turn, that sort of
20:13thing.
20:13So that just gives us more options that we can use if we run short on energy.
20:19We obviously cannot add energy with no engines.
20:22So the only thing we can do is we can affect the rate at which we dissipate what we've got
20:26left.
20:26So we'll always target for the biggest overhead that we can get and generally the farthest runway that we can
20:32get.
20:32So we can drop down to a shorter runway.
20:34A closer runway, I should say, if we need to.
20:36How far away from the touchdown point are you when you start to break that news in and pre-flare?
20:42We hold that steady dive angle, that's 17 degree, down to pre-flare, which is 1,700 feet above the
20:49ground.
20:50And that's where we go into this.
20:52It's not like the old lifting bodies or I guess even the X-15 where it was a pretty abrupt
20:57maneuver, apparently, from what I see.
20:59You can see it's a relatively gentle maneuver, it's about 1.4 G's or so.
21:05So it's a relatively gentle transition that you're trying to make so that you arrive on the 1.5 degree
21:11glide slope.
21:12100, 260, gear is down, 50, 240, 30, 235, 20, 230, 50, 220, 10, 250, 7, 5, 4, 3, 2,
21:261, touchdown.
21:28Left is going to zero.
21:37The rocket aircraft were, and are, a unique part of aviation history.
21:44Thanks for joining us on First Flights.
22:10We'll see you next time.
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