Posted on 04/05/2015 6:47:41 AM PDT by WhiskeyX
[VIDEO] Anyone with some brains and lots of courage can build their own space rocket using everyday, off-the-shelf products. We recently flew to Denmark to meet the founders of Copenhagen Suborbitals, a non-profit open-source D.I.Y. space endeavor.
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
Reminds me of a story a fellow amateur radio operator told me where he loaned his cousin a ham radio to outfit a spacecraft he was building that would take him to Mars. This was the 1950’s or 1960’s, he hasn’t heard from him since so who knows? B-)
Don’t forget the Hannabu flying saucers the Nazis might have had. Some say it could go to the Moon. B-) B-P
Three fiddy?
Well it was about that time that I notice that girl scout was about eight stories tall and was a crustacean from the Paleozoic era
I say “Woman, doan choo go givin’ huh no thee fiddy!”
“In 1945—rumor says that the Nazis put a man into low earth orbit using an A-10. It flew over the USA in a test of a planned attack on New York—flew over the Pacific to land in the sea of Japan. Pilot was rescued by the Japanese Navy and sent by 4 engined plane —over the pole back to Germany. Real or Rumor????”
There were a number of different proposals for such a mission, but they never proceeded to a stage where they could be built and attempted. The Amerika Bomber mission envisioned a variety of weapons systems of which the aircraft and rockets were competing design proposals for the mission. See:
Amerika Bomber
The Amerika-Bomber project was an initiative of the German Reichsluftfahrtministerium, to obtain a long-range strategic bomber for the Luftwaffe that would be capable of striking the contiguous United States from Germany, a distance of about 5,800 km (3,600 mi). The concept was raised as early as 1938, but advanced, cogent plans for such a long-range strategic bomber design did not begin to appear in Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring’s offices until early 1942. Various proposals were put forward, including using it to deliver an atomic bomb (which Germany ultimately never developed), but they were all eventually abandoned as too expensive, and potentially consuming far too much of Germany’s rapidly diminishing aviation production capacity after 1942.
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Conventional bombers
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Huckepack Projekt (Piggyback Project)
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Flying wings
Other proposals were far more exotic jet- and rocket-powered designs, e.g. a flying wing. The Horten brothers designed the Horten Ho XVIII,[10] a flying wing powered by six turbojets based on experiences with their existing Ho X design. The Arado company also suggested a six-jet flying wing design, the Arado E.555.[11]
Winged rockets
Sänger Silbervogel - Wind tunnel model of Eugen Sänger’s sub-orbital bomber, 1935
Other designs were rockets with wings. Perhaps the best-known of these today is Eugen Sänger’s pre-war Silbervogel (”Silverbird”) sub-orbital bomber. While the A4b rocket, winged version of the V-2 rocket and probably its successor A9 rocket were tested several times in late 1944/early 1945, the A9/A10 Amerika-Rakete, planned as a full 2-staged ICBM, remained a project.[12]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_Bomber
Silbervogel
Silbervogel, German for silver bird, was a design for a liquid-propellant rocket-powered sub-orbital bomber produced by Eugen Sänger and Irene Bredt in the late 1930s for The Third Reich/Nazi Germany. It is also known as the RaBo (Raketenbomber or “rocket bomber”). It was one of a number of designs considered for the Amerika Bomber mission, which started out in the spring of 1942 being focused solely on trans-Atlantic range piston-engined strategic bombers, like the Messerschmitt Me 264 and Junkers Ju 390, the only two airframe types actually built and flown for the competition. When Walter Dornberger attempted to create interest in military spaceplanes in the United States after World War II, he chose the more diplomatic term antipodal bomber.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbervogel
Aggregate (rocket family)
The Aggregat series was a set of ballistic missile designs developed in 1933–45 by a research program of Nazi Germany’s army (Wehrmacht). Its greatest success was the A4, more commonly known as the V-2. The German word Aggregat refers to a group of machines working together.[1]
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A9/A10
It was proposed to use an advanced version of the A9 to attack targets on the US mainland from launch sites in Europe, for which it would need to be launched atop a booster stage, the A10.
Design work on the A10 began in 1940, for a projected first flight to take place in 1946. The initial design was carried out by Ludwig Roth und Graupe and was completed on 29 June 1940. Hermann Oberth worked on the design during 1941, and in December 1941 Walter Thiel proposed that the A10 use an engine composed of six bundled A4 engines, which it was thought would give a total thrust of 180 tonnes.
Work on the A10 was resumed in late 1944 under the Projekt Amerika codename, and the A10’s design was amended to incorporate a cluster of 6 A4 combustion chambers feeding into a single expansion nozzle. This was later altered to a massive single chamber and single nozzle. Test stands were constructed at Peenemunde for firings of the 200 tonne thrust motor.
It was considered that existing guidance systems would not be accurate enough over a distance of 5,000 km, and it was decided to make the A9 piloted. The pilot was to be guided on his terminal glide towards the target by radio beacons on U-boats and by automatic weather stations landed in Greenland and Labrador.
The final design of the A10 booster was approximately 65 ft (20 m) in height. Powered by a 375,000 lbf (1,670 kN) thrust rocket burning diesel oil and nitric acid, during its 50 second burn it would have propelled its A9 second stage to a speed of about 2,700 mph (4,300 km/h) and an altitude of 245 mi (394 km).[29]
A11
The A11 (Japan Rakete) was a design concept which would have acted as the first stage of a three-stage rocket, the other two stages being the A9 and A10.
The A11 design was shown by von Braun to US officers in Garmisch-Partenkirchen; the drawing was later published in 1946 by the US Army. The A11 was shown as using six of the large single-chamber engines proposed for the A10 stage, with a modified A10 second stage nested within the A11. The design also showed the winged A9, indicating a gliding landing or bombing mission. To achieve orbit, either a new “kick stage” would have been required, or the A9 would have to have been lightened. In either case, only a payload of approximately 300 kg (660 lb) could have been placed in a low earth orbit.[30]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggregate_(rocket_family)#A9
Chef’s Mother: I gave him a dollar.
Chef’s Father: She gave him a dollar.
Chef’s Mother: I thought he’d go away if I gave him a dollar.
Chef’s Father: Well, of course he’s not gonna go away, Mary! You give him a dollar, he’s gonna assume you got more!
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