On this day in space! May 10, 1967: NASA's M2-F2 lifting body crashes

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On May 10, 1967, a NASA research aircraft known as the wingless M2-F2 lifting body crashed on Rogers Dry Lakebed at the Dryden Flight Research Center in California.

On May 10, 1967, a NASA research aircraft known as the wingless M2-F2 lifting body crashed on Rogers Dry Lakebed at the Dryden Flight Research Center in California.

NASA's wingless M2-F2 lifting body crashed on Rogers Dry Lakebed at the Dryden Flight Research Center in California on May 10, 1967. (Image credit: NASA)

The M2-F2 didn't hit the helicopter, but it did drift away from the runway. Without the markers, it was difficult for the pilot to judge how high he was flying. Peterson didn't deploy the landing gear in time, and the M2-F2 smacked into the ground, rolled over six times, and came to rest upside-down.

Footage from the crash later became famous when it was featured in the TV show "The Six Million Dollar Man" in the 1970s.

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Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.