How To Get Your Hypersonic Lifting Body To Space: Featuring The FDL-5

A 747 with a twist, A hot rod in the sky, The Air Force Sortie Space System, A concept that did fly. With liquid oxygen and hydrogen, Stored deep in its hold, This jumbo jet would soar, With a story yet untold. With drop tanks and a space vehicle, Attached to its back, This bird would fly to the stars, On a mission to track. But alas, its performance, And daunting tech on display, The concept never took off, And quietly flew away. But in the annals of history, It lives on in the mind, A dream of what could have been, A rocket of a different kind. In the 1960s, Lockheed and the U.S. Air Force’s Flight Dynamics Laboratory (FDL) explored several design concepts for hypersonic flight. Three principal vehicles, the FDL-5, FDL-6 and FDL-7, were based on 70-degree triangles and had different designs. The FDL-5 had variable-geometry wings for controlled landings, and one proposal called for it to be carried aloft by a C-5 Galaxy trans