DYNA-SOAR RETURNS '60S IDEA FOR ORBITAL PLANE BACK.

Byline: Jim Skeen Staff Writer

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE - In planning for the future of spaceflight, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is reaching into the past to revive a concept that came tantalizingly close to creating a space plane in the 1960s.

NASA officials plan to get an orbital space plane built that would be launched into orbit aboard a giant rocket and fly back to Earth like a space shuttle. NASA proposes using the space plane to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

The plan revives a concept that the Air Force and NASA tried to turn into reality in the 1960s in a program called Dyna-Soar. The Dyna-Soar was proposed to be launched atop a large booster rocket and to land like an airplane.

``We should have continued the program,'' said state Sen. W.J. ``Pete'' Knight, R-Palmdale, a former Air Force test pilot who would have been one of the Dyna-Soar's first pilots. ``We would have had a mini space shuttle in '64 or '65.''

Also known as an X-20 successor to the famous X-15 rocket planes, the Dyna-Soar was to be a small, delta-wing glider that would carry a pilot and cargo into space. The vehicle's name was drawn from ``dynamic soaring,'' a principle whereby an object can achieve extremely high altitudes through a combination of rocket propulsion and aerodynamic lift.

Unlike the astronauts in the famed Mercury spaceflights, who had little control over their capsules, the Dyna-Soar pilots would have actually flown their spacecraft while in orbit and during the landings.

In fact, there were studies of an idea for Dyna-Soar pilots even to fly the booster and Dyna-Soar in tandem into orbit.

Among those selected as pilots for the program were Knight, who later became a record-setting test pilot in the X-15 rocket plane; Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon; and Milt Thompson and Bill Dana, NASA pilots who went on to stellar careers as research pilots, including flying the X-15.

Rounding out this august group were U.S. Air Force pilots Jim Wood, Hank Gordon and Russ Rogers, Knight's classmate at the Edwards Test Pilot School.

``We were the USAF's version of the Mercury astronauts,'' the late Thompson wrote in his book ``At the Edge of Space.'' ``The USAF would have really eclipsed the Mercury program if it had flown Dyna-Soar, but the Defense Department made the decision to cancel the program in 1963.''

Development of the Dyna-Soar began in the late 1950s. After competition involving several aerospace companies, Boeing was selected to design and build the Dyna-Soar.

The Air Force planned a series of tests in which the Dyna-Soar would have been carried aloft by a modified B-52 and dropped to check out its landing capabilities. That work would have been performed from Edwards Air Force Base.

Suborbital tests were to be conducted atop space boosters launched from Florida. During each test, the booster would have been shut down early for the Dyna-Soar to glide to a landing on one of the Caribbean islands.

On each subsequent test, the Dyna-Soar would have traveled to landing strips farther south in the Caribbean. The final test would have ended in Fortaleza, Brazil.

Space boosters kept changing as rocket technology advanced. Eventually, the Air Force settled on the Titan III, which was still in development.

As booster technology advanced, the flight test plan became more ambitious.

``We thought it was dumb to do this kind of buildup,'' Knight said. ``We decided this has got to be orbital, and we changed it to once-around (once around the world).''

Eventually the plan was for a launch from Florida and landing at Edwards, eventually building up to three orbits around the world.

The Dyna-Soar was designated X-20, reflecting the experimental nature of the program and in keeping with then-President Eisenhower's goal of demilitarizing space.

While significant progress was made on the program, it suffered from Air Force infighting over the direction of the service's space efforts. That infighting undercut the military's ability to persuade Robert McNamara, then secretary of defense, and Congress to provide adequate funding.

On Dec. 10, 1963, McNamara canceled the program.

Knight's opinion of McNamara: ``He was a nut case totally. He thought there was no room in space for wings.''

For the pilots, the cancellation was a bitter pill.

``Within an hour there were four drunk pilots,'' Knight said.

Thompson listed the Dyna-Soar cancellation as one of the reasons the nation's rapid progress in aeronautics research stalled.

``It is such a pity that the Dyna-Soar program, a good sound research program, fell victim to political infighting in the USAF with an assist from Robert McNamara's Department of Defense. The Dyna-Soar could have opened up space to routine operations 15 years before the shuttle,'' Thompson wrote.

All was not lost from the program. An inertial guidance system developed for the X-20 was later used on the X-15 rockets, as was an electric, rather than hydraulic, flight control system.

The success of the flight control system led to the development of a similar system for the F-111 fighter-bomber aircraft.

The program was also America's first attempt at addressing an issue designers of the orbital space plane must also face: developing a space booster reliable enough for launching humans.

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Photo:

(color) State Sen. Pete Knight, R-Palmdale, a famous test pilot in the 1960s, was in line to be one of the first to fly a space plane.

Jeff Goldwater/Staff Photographer