Lockheed Star Clipper

The Lockheed Star Clipper was a proposed Earth-to-orbit spaceplane based on a large lifting body spacecraft and a wrap-around drop tank. It was originally proposed during a United States Air Force program in 1966, and the basic concept lived on in the early years of the NASA Space Shuttle program in new versions such as the LS-200. Maxwell Hunter, who formalized the economics of aircraft operation at Douglas and worked on the Thor missile, devised the stage-and-a-half configuration in 1964, in which only the fuel tanks are staged and ejected so that all the expensive parts return for reuse. He moved to Lockheed in 1965 and Eugene Root, president of Lockheed Missiles and Space, gave him the go-ahead to study it. Star Clipper did not progress far, but its detailed study of the cost advantages of the drop tank sharply cut development risk and cost and strongly shaped the semi-reusable Space Shuttle design.