The scientist, pilots and astronauts at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Facility at Edwards Air Force Base got one amazing special delivery on the morning of January 31, 1977. The package was technically known as OV-101 but a bunch of Star Trek buffs had coaxed the White House into giving her the name Enterprise. She was the first fully assembled, flight (though not space flight) testable model of the long awaited space shuttle. She must have seemed amazing that cold morning, capable of carrying a crew of ten and a sixty foot long payload. Most important this baby could glide unpowered to a pinpoint landing from orbit. As revolutionary this craft was, coming months before the launch of the Voyager spacecraft, there had to be some knowing winks and nods among the Dryden folks. Back before they'd even been called Dryden, back when they were the Flight Research Center (FRC) they had made the space shuttle possible, with the help of some Detroit steel.

As early as the 1930's theorist realized the advantage of "flying" a spaceship out of orbit. You could bring back a heavier craft, it would sustain less damage and you would know exactly where the thing was going to land. In one famous case, a Russian cosmonaut landed hundreds of miles off course and had to fend off wolves until rescued. The problem was that conventional wings would rip off under the stress of re-entry. The thinking of the day said that you had to build spaceships like ballistic missiles, crashing back into the atmosphere completely uncontrolled.

That changed in 1957 when Dr. Alfred Eggers at what would become the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field California realized that a ballistic spaceship could be flattened on one side, effectively making the whole thing into a wing, referred to as a "lifting body." With some flight controls, he reasoned, you could "fly" the ship unpowered back to Earth. "Flies like a brick," one shuttle pilot reported. He drew up plans for a model called the M2, unfortunately, the focus of space research at the time was on intercontinental missiles and satellites so Dr. Eggers discovery went unnoticed until 1962.

In February of that year, R. Dale Reed, Dryden engineer and remote control airplane buff, got interested in the M2 and built a scale model of it which he "launched" by dropping it from one of his planes. It glided and landed as Eggers had predicted. Dryden director Paul Bikle saw this model and approved the building a full scale M2. The

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