Lifting Body - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

Much of the general public had neither heard of nor seen anything about these designs until viewing the 1970s television program The Six Million Dollar Man. The show's title sequence introduced its premise using footage of the lifting body aircraft, culled from actual NASA exercises. 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. Peterson survived to fly again, and the craft was rebuilt as the M2-F3.

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. 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.