The Northrop HL-10 was one of five heavyweight lifting body designs flown at NASA's Flight Research Center, Edwards, California, from July 1966 to November 1975 to study and validate the concept of safely maneuvering and landing a low lift-over-drag vehicle designed for reentry from space. It was a NASA design and was built to evaluate "inverted airfoil" lifting body and delta planform.
According to the book "Wingless Flight", by project engineer R. Dale Reed, if he had had his way, the HL-10 would have flown in space in the early to mid-1970s. Following the cancellation of the Apollo moon project, Reed realized that there would be substantial Apollo hardware left over, including several flight-rated command modules and Saturn V rockets.
His plan was to heavily modify the HL-10 at the Flight Research Center with the addition of an ablative heat shield, reaction controls, and other additional subsystems needed for manned spaceflight. The now space-rated vehicle would have then flown on the Apollo-Saturn V launch vehicle in the same space which originally held the Lunar Module.
Once in Earth orbit, it was planned that a robotic extraction arm would remove the vehicle from the rocket's third stage and place it adjacent to the manned Apollo CSM spacecraft. One of the astronauts, who would be trained to fly the vehicle, would then spacewalk from the Apollo and board the lifting body to perform a pre-reentry check on its systems.
It was planned that there would be two flights in this program. In the first, the lifting body pilot would return to the Apollo and send the HL-10 back to earth unmanned. If this flight was successful, on the next launch, he would then pilot the HL-10 back to earth for a planned landing at Edwards AFB.
Reportedly, Wernher von Braun thought it a wonderful idea and offered to prepare two Saturn Vs and Apollo Command Service Modules for the mission. Flight Research Center director Paul Bickle said no, stating that this was beyond his expertise or area of interest.
In an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man entitled "The Deadly Replay", the HL-10 is identified as the aircraft flown by Col. Steve Austin when he crashed, leading to his transformation into a bionic man, and the HL-10 is also featured in this episode.
In 2000 I was visiting Edwards and learned that there was a plan to re-create the lifting body program as an escape vehicle for the ISS. But they didn't have any of the original paper drawings or designs and none of that was in CAD. So they removed two of the old ones from on top of display pedestals to take measurements.
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