The Nazi Rocket Plane to Nuke New York From Orbit

Gizmodo via Jalopnik ^ | 6/9/10 | Peter Orosz

[fogofbobegabay]

DC, San Francisco and Detroit were decent and patriotic cities in the 1940’s.

[CORedneck]

Interesting article. I had an interest in the advanced German aircraft and technology.

[JRios1968]

If they were to hit Detroit today...would anyone notice?

[calex59]

The article didn’t mention the first operational helicopters. Some people claim they were not real helicopters but in fact they were.

[calex59]

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.

[Nepeta]

Yeah, it didn't bother him a bit that slave labor was being worked to hideaus deaths from exhaustion to produce the rockets that were being used to bomb England and with luck, murder the rest of the world.

An excellent read on this subject is Planet Dora.

In addition to slave labor, thousands starved because so many potatoes were diverted to fermentation to produce ethanol to fuel the V-2s.

[Young Werther]

When you read history there are different opinions about the facts. von Braun and his rocket scientists and technicians surrendered to the allied and were not charged with war crimes. They were brought to the United States and worked with the Army to develop the military rockets that the US wanted, needed and developed.

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"

[Paradox]

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.

[Gandalf_The_Gray]

He was a scientist and apolitical by nature.

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

[SunkenCiv]

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.

[SunkenCiv]

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.”