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Old 04-20-2012, 07:18 AM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Default X-24 Bug's inspiration--MEM?

Hello All,

The current discussion in the following thread started by Ironnerd (see: http://www.oldrocketforum.com/showt...07&page=1&pp=10 ) about the Centuri X-24 Bug lifting body boost-glider (see: www.spacemodeling.org/JimZ/centuri/ka-12.pdf ) got me wondering...just what *was* Centuri's inspiration for this "triangular cross-section cone" boost-glider? I have found a NASA manned Mars mission study whose lifting body lander design might have inspired the X-24 Bug's design. Illustrations of this lifting body Mars lander were featured in several popular books on space exploration in the 1960s, and the late space artist Robert McCall also included it in a 1968 painting of a Mars base, so this design would have been known to Centuri's model rocket kit designers. Below is more information on (and links to illustrations of) this lifting body Mars lander.

In a 1963 NASA Marshall Space Flight Center study, Philco Aeronutronic designed a lifting body Mars Excursion Module (MEM, which was also informally called the "Martian Taxi") which had a triangular cross-section like the X-24 Bug. This MEM design had two stages (a descent stage and an ascent stage). After conducting a de-orbit burn with its descent engine and entering the martian atmosphere, the MEM would have been flown to its landing site, after which it would have pitched nose-up and deployed a parachute from near its nose. After descending tail-first to a low altitude, the MEM's descent engine would have fired again and the parachute would have been jettisoned, and the spacecraft would have deployed its landing legs and then touched down gently under rocket power. Also:

The MEM can be seen on pages 16, 17, and 18 of David Portree's book "Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning, 1950 - 2000" (see: http://history.nasa.gov/monograph21/Chapter%203_low.pdf ). An illustration of this MEM design is also included in this wikipedia article on proposed manned missions to Mars (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned_mission_to_Mars ). This MEM design would make a nice scale lifting body boost-glider under the F/F (Future/Fiction) scale category.
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