An Email From Larry Brown

I just got this email from Larry Brown. He must have ran across the blog doing a search of the X-24.
This letter gives some insight into the X-24 Bug development. As Larry explains, he did a lot of design work for Centuri.

Hello.

For 4 years, I worked in R&D at Centuri engineering with Grant Boyd as the divisional head.  The X-24 was one of my designs.

A few years prior, I worked in Quebec in a high-rise office building.  We're talking 1969.  I don't remember how many of us were involved, but somehow, we got into a contest to see who could make a Styrofoam coffee cup fly the best. I think it started by spiral-footballing them into trash cans and evolved (or degenerated) from there.  Finally, we were launching off the roof.  I was into model rocketry and interested in lifting bodies, so I tried adding tiny lumps of modeling clay to the nose and to a spot near the rim to see if I could get the cup to assume an angle of attack while falling.  Eventually, I had a flying cup... horrible by any standards other than maybe any other Styrofoam cups.

Pages blow off the calendar and I'm in Arizona at Centuri.  They had a rocket called the Point, a paper cone with no fins needed.   I started fooling with it and, thanks to a plastic nose cone (weightier than the Point's balsa) and some modeling clay at a point near the rim.  Sure enough, it went up kinda straight and sort of glided back down.  I stuffed a more triangular insert into it so the clay weight could offer more roll stabilization and added a paper cockpit and a paint job.  It worked even better.  So I suggested it as a product: MR's first lifting body.  The boss wanted fins.  I worried that any warping or misalignment of the fins would induce roll - and then it wouldn't glide.   Lost that one.  For NARAMs and local demos, I took to using only the tips of the cut-out fins, more for decoration than anything else.  Aerodynamically, the X-24 has less drag with no fins or maybe with tiny glue-ons to resemble pods of some sort.

If you're still fooling around with this, try making a card-stock pattern, printing up a bunch, and see for yourself.  It makes for a nice lesson in aerodynamics - and it doesn't need a huge field.

I was canned from Centuri during a purge by the parent company.  Had designed a bunch of rockets there, my favorites being the Space Shuttle and the Orion.  Worked 4 more years in business and have been an English and history teacher for the last 40 years.

Cheers,
Larry Brown, Hyannis, MA

I don't think Larry remembered we had met before. He gave me the tour of Centuri. Later I got to know the Centuri R&D guys at the NARAMs in 1975, 76 and 77.