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SP-4220 Wingless Flight: The Lifting Body Story

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

 

[iii] I would like to express my appreciation to the following people for their contributions to this book: Dr. J. D. Hunley, NASA Dryden Historian, who took on the task of reviewing my original manuscript to ensure that it was internally consistent, written for the proper audience, and historically accurate. Dr. Hunley added footnotes, expanded and edited the glossary, and compiled the present bibliography. Dr. Hunley also enlisted Dr. Darlene Lister to reorganize the original manuscript for a smooth presentation to the reading audience. To Richard P. Hallion, who is probably this country's best aviation historian, for his generous offer to allow information from his books and documents, including On the Frontier, Test Pilots, and The Hypersonic Revolution, to be incorporated into this book. His attention to detail on facts, dates, and management of early aircraft development programs made it easier to correlate my own personal story of the lifting-body program with other activities of the time.

 

Also, I would like to thank Robert Kempel and Wen Painter for their generous offer to allow me to use portions of their personal story of the HL-10 Lifting Body entitled Developing and Flight Testing the HL-10 Lifting Body: 4 Precursor to the Space Shuttle, a NASA Reference Publication published in April 1994, to be used in this book.

 

For their contributions to the book's technical accuracy, I would like to thank the following people who read the original manuscript and in some eases, the reorganized version, and provided technical corrections where appropriate: Bill Dana, Chuck Yeager, John Manke, and Bruce Peterson, lifting body pilots; and Robert Hoey, Bob Kempel, Wen Painter, Ed Saltzman, and Joe Wilson, lifting body engineers.

 

Thanks also to Betty Love, aeronautical research technician, for contributing both recorded and unrecorded flight records on original M2-F1 flights and for her comments on the reorganized version of the manuscript; John Muratore, X-38 program manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center, for reviewing the portion of the last chapter on the X-38 program; David Urie, from Lockheed, and Steve Ishmael, from NASA, for reviewing the portion of the last chapter dealing with the X-33 program; the NASA Headquarters Printing and Design office Vanessa Nugent and Kimberly Jenkins for their Design and Editorial work, as well as Stanley Artis and Michael Crnkovic who saw the book through the printing process.

 

R. Dale Reed, Aerospace Engineer

NASA Dryden Flight Research Center

August 1997

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