NASA’s Hot Rod Pontiac Helped Design the Space Shuttle

It’s no Fiero, but this Pontiac muscle car got fast and furious for science.

It’s every street racer’s fantasy: The government, facing an intractable problem that its brightest scientists and most dedicated agents can’t solve, turns its eye toward the hot rod community for the kind of specialized assistance only it can provide.

Sound far-fetched, like the plot of a Fast and Furious movie? What if we told you the federal branch reaching out to the gearhead crowd wasn’t even the Department of Transportation, but actually NASA? No, we’re not talking about sending Tej and Roman into orbit behind the wheel of a hopped-up Fiero, but rather a very different— and very real—Pontiac-based program that relied on big cubic inches to help usher America’s nascent shuttle design into the later space age.

Big Gliders, Big Problems

The year was 1963, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was hard at work testing out an aerodynamic concept that it hoped would guide the next generation of manned space flight. The dream of a reusable vehicle that could land itself on a runway after each and every mission, rather than forcing the Navy to fish astronauts out of a capsule in the ocean, had triggered feverish study on what this kind of vessel—what eventually became the space shuttle—would look like.

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Facing unprecedented heat during returns through the atmosphere, simplicity was the order of the day for the shuttle, as reducing the exposure of sensitive flight surfaces such as wings and ailerons to the pressures of re-entry was crucial to protecting its occupants from disaster.

The idea of a “lifting body,” which eschews traditional wings in favor of generating lift with the fuselage of the vehicle itself, had been around since the 1950s, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that research into this type of aircraft got serious. NASA, in particular, was all over the lifting body, as the lack of wings made them virtually drag-free (an important consideration when managing the heat of a vehicle returning from space).

Super Duty Reporting For Duty

Testing a lifting body was a challenge. Sure, you could strap a rocket to one and launch it from an already-airborne plane, but that was expensive and dangerous at best. NASA had no use for a space vehicle capable of suborbital powered flight, as the extra weight of a jet engine or auxiliary rocket and its associated fuel were unwelcome complications. Intent on examining the viability of a lifting body that would glide from orbit all the way to the ground, scientists and engineers put the literal top down and headed out to the desert to start their testing.

Wait, what? Here’s where the story gets interesting for fans of American muscle. A significant portion of NASA’s lifting body testing was handled by towed flight, where the vehicle in question—in this case the MF-21, a stubby, single-passenger glider—would be tugged up to speeds where it could slip the surly bonds of Earth and achieve unpowered flight for as many seconds as possible.

NASA’s tow vehicle of choice was pulled straight from the NASCAR paddock. Needing something that was wide enough to be stable at speeds of more than 100 mph, powerful enough to get there in the first place, and without a pesky roof getting in the way of scientific observation, the Administration made what was likely the second notable muscle machine requisition request in government history (after the chase vehicles required to guide U-2 spy planes in for landings from the 1950s onward) by purchasing a 1963 Pontiac Catalina convertible.

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Why the Catalina? With a 421-cubic-inch Super Duty V-8 under the hood, its high-compression design and 6,400-rpm redline gave it 410 horsepower when equipped with a pair of four-barrel carburetors. The NASA-spec Pontiac also came with a four-speed manual gearbox. Those stats were only a starting point, however, as the vehicle was then sent to legendary speed freaks Bill Stroppe and Mickey Thompson (yes, that Mickey Thompson) to have it thoroughly customized for the administration’s specific needs.

Ultimately, the Pontiac Catalina used for tow testing emerged from the shop with a claimed top speed of 140 mph, with as much of the engine’s considerable torque pushed as high in the powerband as possible, at engine speeds where the Pontiac would live most of its life out in the desert flats. It was geared to be capable of 0–100-mph sprints in just 30 seconds, all while towing 1,000 pounds of MF-21 behind it.

Keeping scientists safe were a pair of roll bars, as well as extensive suspension modifications intended to further enhance its stability at triple-digit speeds, with many of these modifications courtesy of NASCAR builder Ralph Sparks.

Desert Drags For Science

And so the testing began, with one NASA employee driving the preposterous Pontiac and a second sitting in the rear-facing observation seat that had been outfitted to the vehicle’s passenger side. If anyone else was brave enough to strap themselves in, there was room for two more in a reverse-mounted bench in the back. Once underway, liftoff for the MF-21 occurred at around 60 mph, hovering about 20 feet off the ground as speeds pushed past the century mark.

To the casual observer it looked like the Pontiac was screaming down the sand while flying a big bathtub-shaped kite, a bucolic if somewhat noisy scene with the creeping subtext that, at these speeds, someone was likely to be killed if anything went wrong. Fortunately, the program was a success, and the MF-21 prototype (which consisted of mahogany stretched over a tube frame with basic pitch and roll controls) conducted four dozen tow flights without incident. This led to further aerial towing tests involving aircraft, altogether providing extensive amounts of data that served as guideposts to designing the upcoming space shuttle’s lifting body shape.

As for the Catalina itself, it remained fully “street legal” in the sense that it had government plates to go with the NASA livery lettered onto its side. This allowed test site employees to drive the vehicle to and from the dry lake bed on public roads and also stretch its legs in nearby Nevada, whose long, flat, and speed-limit-free roads had some program participants claiming the car’s scientifically calibrated speedometer showed a terminal velocity of 180 mph.

Once the program ended, the Pontiac was sent to NASA’s Langley, Virginia, test facility, where it participated in further tests before being retired. After disappearing from the public eye for decades, it eventually resurfaced at its old stomping ground, and it is scheduled to go on display at the Edwards Air Force Base’s Flight Test Museum (a facility that is still undergoing construction).