After Years, Inventor May Get His Shot at Mars : Space: R. Dale Reed developed technology for a Mars explorer in the 1970s. At long last, NASA might use it.

On a bright Lancaster morning recently, as youthful joggers leisurely circled the Antelope Valley College track, a lanky, balding man in a red cap and frayed slacks started the engine of a model airplane nearby and sent it soaring aloft, using a radio controller.

As the joggers stared skyward, R. Dale Reed of Lancaster maneuvered the Ruthee II, a red and yellow craft with a six-foot wingspan that he helped build, through dips and turns at up to 1,000 feet.

Unbeknown to those nearby, Reed also was triggering a simple automatic camera in the plane’s belly, taking panoramic photos of the people and terrain below--a rehearsal for what he hopes to accomplish some day over the red dunes of Mars.

Reed, 59, is no ordinary model airplane buff. An innovator, an inventor and aeronautical engineer, he has spent a career devising unusual aircraft for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Over more than three decades, Reed has been the creative force behind a host of NASA projects, including pioneering work with remotely piloted aircraft and research that paved the way for the space shuttle.

But Reed’s ambition aims for a more distant goal: An experimental aircraft he designed is being considered by NASA for use in exploring Mars someday, in much the same way that Ruthee II circled Antelope Valley College.

His career has been distinguished, his awards are numerous and he is commended by his peers. During his tenure with NASA, Reed managed 19 programs, designed 12 aircraft and got a patent for his Mars aircraft. But some of Reed’s most significant ideas have become victims of circumstance.

His concept of a Mars explorer, first developed in the mid-1970s, is one of those. Three prototypes of his propeller-driven aircraft, dubbed the Mini-Sniffer for its exploratory capabilities, sat idle at Edwards Air Force Base before they were moved to an Arizona university several years ago.

Now, with the U.S. government’s attention expanding from the space shuttle program outward to planned exploration of Mars in the 1990s, Reed has reason to hope again. “I’ve had enough experience over the years,” he said. “If you know something is right, you just hang in there until things change. There will be an airplane flown on another planet. It’s just a matter of when.”

Reed has been obsessed by aviation since he flew model planes as a 12-year-old in his native Idaho. He learned to fly at 16 and came to the Antelope Valley to work for NASA from 1953 until his retirement in 1985.

But retirement was short-lived. Reed spent the past four years designing aircraft at Lockheed Corp.’s “Skunk Works” facility in Burbank. In June, tiring of the long commute, he returned to Edwards to design for a NASA subcontractor, Planning Research Corp.

“My motivation is if it’s something new and never been charted before,” Reed said.

“I feel I’m a catalyst. I can get people started in different directions,” he added. “I will never be content with not being creative. I love airplanes. I’m hooked for life.”

Anyone who’s watched the opening sequence of the television show “The Six Million Dollar Man” knows Reed’s work. The scene of actor Lee Majors’ spacecraft crashing in the desert is footage of the real 1967 crash near Edwards of a prototype rocket-powered craft designed by Reed.

On television, Majors ended up with superhuman strength. In real life, NASA test pilot Bruce Peterson was injured but survived the crash of the M2-F2, one in a series of wingless, flatiron-shaped spacecraft Reed pioneered that helped NASA design the space shuttles for re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere.

Reed’s work as project manager on the lifting body program from 1962 to 1969 led NASA to award him its exceptional service medal.

The series of so-called lifting bodies invented and successfully tested by Reed in the 1960s and early 1970s showed that a spacecraft, which could not have regular wings because they would be torn off in the re-entry process, could still make a gliding, airplane-like landing. Previously, spacecraft had plummeted and parachuted into the ocean.

But Reed’s wingless concept never quite made aerospace superstardom, although his M2-F2 wound up on display at the Smithsonian. Reed had wanted his then-revolutionary design used for the Apollo missions to the moon, but NASA rejected that. And later, a new heat shielding breakthrough allowed NASA to equip the space shuttles with stubby wings, again foiling his design.

In a way, Reed’s concept of a Mars explorer has been a victim of his own successful lifting body research, which benefited the shuttle program. By the late 1970s, the shuttle program alone was taking about one-third of NASA’s entire budget. And that left little money for other projects.

NASA at the time had been planning several missions to Mars, either probes or manned explorations, to follow the two unmanned Viking landings on the red planet in 1976. But the follow-up missions, which had launch dates in the early 1980s, were scrubbed, and plans for the Mini-Sniffer died with them.

But Reed has not despaired for the future of his twin-boom craft, believing it someday will make the more than 35-million-mile trip to Mars, the closest planet to Earth. In the meantime, he said, “I’m not waiting. I’m working on other things. If I get one that’s popular, that’s the one I work on.”

The inventor’s next shot at Mars, however, may not be far in the future. NASA officials are tentatively targeting a human landing on Mars within 30 years as their next big advance, said Charles Redmond, a NASA spokesman. The agency has already set a 1992 launch date for a craft to orbit Mars, and that could be followed in the late 1990s by an unmanned landing.

As Reed envisions it, a group of half a dozen or so of his Mini-Sniffers, carrying scientific gear in their nose cones, could be carried to Mars folded in a spacecraft. His aircraft, with a single six-foot, rear-mounted propeller and a 22-foot wingspan, could be shot into Mars’ atmosphere in a protective pod.

Once there, the pod would be jettisoned and the aircraft would begin unfolding while descending in a parachute. The plane’s propeller would start, the parachute would release and the remote-controlled craft could swoop off on its mission. Controlled by an on-board computer--perhaps with programs activated by radio signals from Earth--it could explore, relay television pictures, take infrared or other special photographs, land and take samples or do whatever scientists desire.

The Mini-Sniffer started out in the mid-1970s as Reed’s invention for testing Earth’s atmosphere at altitudes of up to 100,000 feet. Scientists wanted to monitor whether exhaust from then-new supersonic transports was damaging the Earth’s ozone layer. But the transports never proliferated, and so Reed turned his thoughts to Mars.

The unique aspect of Reed’s Mini-Sniffer is its fuel, hydrazine, a highly toxic rocket propellant. Unlike many other fuels, it has the advantage of not needing oxygen to burn, and it would work well in Mars’ mostly carbon dioxide atmosphere. Reed said he was the first to use it as an aircraft fuel after learning that a fellow scientist was powering go-carts with it.

But Reed also has competition to help pave the way for a human landing on Mars. Redmond said scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena are pursuing a land-rover vehicle, while others are developing a spear-like probe that would be shot into Mars’ surface. “All three are out there now in technical assessment,” Redmond said.

Reed believes his craft has major advantages. He said it would be much more mobile and could cross or explore the deep canyons on Mars, unlike either of the other two devices. Reed said his craft, depending on its payload, could travel up to several thousand miles and even make several landings and takeoffs using a tail assembly he designed.

But for now, the three models of the aircraft he built--the first two with gas engines and the final version powered by hydrazine--sit silently on display at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona. The gas-engined models made more than 30 flights. The final model was flown only once at Edwards in the late 1970s before a fuel leak curtailed the test, Reed said. NASA provided no funding for further flights, he added.

That leaves Reed with only his Ruthee II model plane, fitted with his wife’s pocket camera, as a symbol of his Mars concept.

“It’s a very simple, low-technology thing,” Reed said. “But it shows what you can do.”