height of about and a launch speed of about . Moments after being dropped, the XLR-11 was lit by the pilot. Speed and altitude increased until the engine was shut down by choice or fuel exhaustion, depending upon the individual mission profile. The lifting bodies normally carried enough fuel for about 100 seconds of powered flight and routinely reached from and speeds above Mach 1. Following engine shutdown, the pilot maneuvered the vehicle through a simulated return-from-space corridor into a pre-planned approach for a landing on one of the lakebed runways on Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards. A circular approach was used to lose altitude during the landing phase. On the final approach leg, the pilot increased his rate of descent to build up energy. At about altitude, a "flare out" maneuver dropped air speed to about for the landing. Unusual and valuable lessons were learned through the successful flight testing of the HL-10. During the early phases of the Space Shuttle development program, lifting bodies patterned on the HL-10 shape were one of three major types of proposals. These were later rejected as it proved difficult to fit cylindrical fuel tanks into the always-curving fuselage, and from then on most designs focused on more conventional delta wing craft. HL-10 pilots John A. Manke — 10 flights, 7 powered flights William H. Dana — 9 flights, 8 powered flights Jerauld R. Gentry — 9 flights, 2 powered flights Peter C. Hoag — 8 flights, 7 powered flights Bruce Peterson — 1 flight, 0 powered flights Unrealized space flight According to the book "Wingless Flight", by project engineer R. Dale Reed, the HL-10 was considered to fly into space in the early to mid-1970s. Following the cancellation of the Apollo moon project, Reed realized that there would be substantial Apollo hardware left over, including several flight-rated command service modules (CSM) and Saturn V rockets. The proposal was to add an ablative heat shield, reaction controls, and other additional subsystems needed for crewed spaceflight to the HL-10. The now space-rated vehicle would have then been launched in the space for the Lunar Module on a Saturn V launch vehicle with an Apollo CSM. Once in Earth orbit, it was planned that a robotic extraction arm would remove the HL-10 from the rocket's third stage and place it adjacent to the crewed Apollo CSM spacecraft. One of the astronauts would then spacewalk from