Hyper III

The NASA Hyper III was a one-flight unpiloted lifting-body glider built by NASA Dryden in 1969 to test a low-speed long-endurance shape that an Earth-orbiting return spacecraft could use after re-entry. Designed by R. Dale Reed (the same engineer behind the M2-F1), the Hyper III was assembled in two months at a cost of about USD$6,500 from welded steel tubing, plywood, and Mylar plastic — the cheapest piloted-format X-shape NASA ever built, even though it never carried a pilot.

The aerodynamic configuration was a flat-plate fuselage with detachable straight wings to give the craft enough cruise lift-to-drag ratio (about 6:1) for an extended subsonic glide. The intent was to validate the cruise-phase shape of a future hypersonic vehicle that would re-enter from orbit on a high-drag lifting-body section, then deploy long wings for a low-speed glide to a runway. The single Hyper III flight came on 12 December 1969 — towed aloft by a NASA helicopter to about 10,000 ft, then released to glide unpowered to the lakebed at Edwards AFB. The remote-piloted approach went smoothly; the project was concluded with that one flight.

The Hyper III's data set was modest — one flight is one data point — but the configuration concept fed indirectly into later morphing-wing and hybrid-airframe research. NASA never built a follow-on Hyper IV or Hyper V; the lifting-body programme moved to the heavyweight X-24 designs at about the same time. The single Hyper III airframe survives in storage at NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center.