Dr. Zooch Rockets
CRV LIFTING BODY
$27.95
| This is a design that I started working on back in 1973. I
refined it in 1975 and my first balsa sticks and tissue paper version flew
that year. It took a long time to get the angles right and get it to fly.
Keep in mind that I knew little about aerodynamics at the time- and almost
nothing about how lifting bodies worked. I had seen a photo of an M2-F2
and perhaps read a paragraph about it, but that was pretty much all. What
I reasoned was that a lifting body would slide along through the air
rather than drop through it… hey… for kid, that was pretty abstract.
Once I made the design sail, I scaled down the tissue paper version and
piggy-backed it on a rocket. When I launched it, however, the tissue paper
blew out and the stick frame came tumbling back. |
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In the spring of 1977 I started work on the lifting body again- this time I made it out of sheet balsa. Only problem was that no matter how I ballasted it- it wanted to fly upside down! The solution... flip it over and put the fins on the other side and call the bottom the top! I renamed it the CRV for Crumman Research Vehicle- (CRV… an acronym stolen by NASA years later *doh*!) I painted it red and black to resemble the XRV from “Marooned.” On August 15, 1977 this version of the lifting body was successfully flown. That was the last rocket I flew for the next 25 years, because just a few days after the flight I packed up and moved away to college to learn how to pilot the real stuff and gave up model rockets. |
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Following my years spent strapped into the nose of assorted flying machines, I found myself in the model rocket business and have been trying to bring back some of my projects from my weird youth to aid me in being a weird adult. One of the things I wanted to develop most into a kit is the CRV lifting body, which BTW is the star in my cartoon strip “The Program” found at www.klydemorris.com. This kit is the result. The external tank is based on a T-55 tube and the whole stack stands 10 inches tall in display mode and ~15 inches tall with the FlameFins added for flight. |
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The booster is parachute recovery and
the stack flies best on an 18mm “C” engine. |
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This is an ADVANCED kit! In the words of the late great Milt Thompson- the first lifting body test pilot, “flyin’ lifting bodies ain’t easy…” and this kit’s performance is totally dependent on your skills and ability to follow the instructions… not to mention a bit of luck too. Several years ago, a friend of mine at NASA Dryden showed one of these lifting body models to Dale Reed, the father of lifting bodies- he said it was a great shape and “…would make an interesting hypersonic shape…” Not bad for something designed by a high school kid in mid Michigan. |
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