Posted on 07/09/2010 3:13:52 PM PDT by mgstarr
V-2’s falling on London were just the beginning. Had the Nazis had their way, Mach 22 bombers would have devastated America from space. The scary thing? The concept was not entirely insane. This is the story of Eugen Sänger’s Silbervogel.
V2 rocket. Germany may have lost the war but certainly not for lack of engineering genius. The sheer amount of advanced weaponry and concepts dreamed up during the Thousand-Year Reich’s 12 years in business continues to baffle the mind. 800 mm artillery pieces? Check. The world’s first jet fighter, cruise missile, and sub-orbital ballistic missile? Check, check, and check.
On the other hand, look what America did: it focused most of its efforts on a single advanced weapon, moving well beyond the concept stage. But the audacity of the German weapon concepts still fascinates, rather like their very successful 1930s Grand Prix cars. And the more feasible of them did eventually become products, as a search for Saturn V will show.
The most breathtaking concept was Eugen Sänger’s Silbervogel (“Silver Bird”). It was a design study commissioned by the Air Ministry for a problem Hermann Göring had spotted, namely that Germany’s most powerful future enemy happened to be Wind tunnel model of the Silbervogel defended by the mother of all moats: the Atlantic Ocean. The ministry launched an initiative by the name of Amerika Bomber and Germany’s crew of evil geniuses set to work.
Most of the concepts presented to the ministry were upscaled conventional bombers, but not Sänger’s bird, not that. Sänger was a member of the rocket society Verein für Raumschiffahrt—like rocket car designer Max Valier and most of the people who would later run NASA and build America’s rockets—and his eyes were set on sub-orbital space, as outlined in his 1933 book Raketenflugtechnik (“Technology of Rocket Flight”). For the Air Ministry’s project, he expanded it in 1944 with his future wife Irene Bredt under the name Über einen Raketenantrieb für Fernbomber (“A Rocket Drive for Long-Range Bombers”).
[more at link]
Interesting article. I had an interest in the advanced German aircraft and technology.
If they were to hit Detroit today...would anyone notice?
The article didn’t mention the first operational helicopters. Some people claim they were not real helicopters but in fact they were.
That would be the Me262. We captured a bunch of them as well as the Soviet Union. From the info gathered on them we built the F86 Sabre jet and the Russians built the Mig 15. Both were very close in design.
Eisenhower and LBJ formed NASA and von Braun and his rocket engineers took us from Explorer 1 to the Moon.
I am a member of the National Space Society that was formed by von Braun and Dr Gerald O'Neil whose book the High Frontier forms the basis for us to proceed Ad Astra!
Believe what you will but don't "seig heil me"
As I recall, this plane was not going to be coming down from orbit. It would have been suborbital, and “skipped” off the atmosphere across the atlantic, towards the US.
When von Braun was congratulated by the Wehrmacht General in charge of the rocket program for the first successful test firing of a V2 (A4 as it was known by the development team), he was reported to have said "Unfortunately it hit the wrong planet".
When Peenemunde fell to the advancing Allied troops they found not only A4s in production but also designs for more advanced rockets up to A9. The A9 was a four stage rocket which could reach the east coast of the US. They were in the process of building prototype hardware just before they surrendered to operation "paper clip".
Regards,
GtG
Thanks! There was also the A9-A10 combination, which was a non-nuclear (because the Nazi a-bomb project was stymied) high explosive warhead, which also had stubby wings and a live pilot (because auto-guidance couldn’t be developed in time for that distance), and sat atop the A10 booster. The rocket would have been fired in Germany, done a suborbital arc, the A9 would have kicked the booster loose, and the pilot would have guided it in, target NYC; once the craft was at low enough altitude for the existing guidance to be sufficient, and to be safe enough for ejection, the pilot would have jumped, chuted down, and been recovered by U-boat.
Had they made an earlier start, it might have been built, and a German would have been the first man in space, during WWII. Having no nuke meant it would have only been a terror weapon (like the V2). The resources needed to prototype, test, and deploy were too enormous for the Reich to spare. So, it never made it off the drawing board.
There’s an anecdote about Von Braun, from after a successful V2 test, maybe the first one. Someone asked him if he’d rather be going to the Moon. “Of course we’re going to the Moon, we just haven’t told Der Fuhrer.”
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