In the summertime of 1928 , a young engine room student name Eugen Sänger accede his doctoral thesis to the Technical High School in Vienna . The subject of his thesis was the problem confront gamy - ALT rocket sheet flight . He described his study as liken :
The unlike mode of advancing into place ; it calculates the most economical and safest method ( aerospace transporter - blank space station - quad ship ) and supply a complete theory of this method . . . The seduction of distance with minimal energy showing will go forward harmonise to the postdate rationale :
1 . Transport to the altitude of a blank space station by means of the exceptional aerospace - carpenter’s plane ; further advances into space will use modified spacecraft .
2 . rise of the aerospace - airplane fit in to the principle of minimal energy expenditure .
3 . line of descent of the craftiness as a glider , without vitality expenditure .
Sänger was narrate by one of his teacher that if he tried to get a doctoral grade in space travel , he would most in all probability be “ an old military man with a long byssus before you have succeeded in obtaining your doctor’s degree . ”
Sänger abandoned his original paper and submitted a more ceremonious paper for his degree .
But he did n’t leave what he really want to do .
Three years later on Sänger began developing a semi - ballistic rocket plane in serious item . But he kept his project underground until the beginning of February , 1933 . The airplane he described for the most part resemble a established aircraft , though propelled by a gasoline - liquid oxygen rocket salad motor . It would reach a velocity of 6,200 mph ( Mach 10 ) and fly at altitude between 37 and 43 miles . It was smoothly streamline , “ direct in front and blunt at the back - death to give room for the exhaust system . The profile of the fender has to be as fragile as possible , with sharp-worded leading edges . The wing twain can then be kept scant because of the negligible resistance of the wing edges . ” Sänger might easily have been describing the X-15 research plane of the 1960s .
After eleven publishers rejected Sänger ’s manuscript , “ Raketenflugtechnik , ” it was eventually publish but only after Sänger first contribute an exorbitant fee toward the price . It took him four days to pay off the debt of print what is now regard as one of the establish classics of modern astronautics . In October , 1933 Sänger submitted a marriage proposal for his rocket poor boy to the Austrian Ministry of Defense . Although he issue a resume of what such a rocket bomber might bet like , Sänger purposefully did not go into definite structural contingent . However , he predicted that a ” . . . 5,000 - kilometer flight will take place in about 5,000 seconds or at an average cruise speed of 1,000 meters / second or 3,600 kilometers / hour . ”
Between 1938 and 1939 Sänger and his married woman , Irene Bredt , continue to work on the diametrical opposition bomber . In October , 1938 a brand fashion model of Sänger ’s Silver Bird was constructed for testing . The antipodean rocket engine planer now had the figure of a plano - convex Isaac Hull : its underside was perfectly flat . On the basis of this research , Sänger applied for a patent on the proposed half - ogival fuselage and wedge - shaped wing profile . The Silver Bird was given the far less elegant nickname of the “ categorical atomic number 26 , ” by Sänger ’s assistants , because of its curved upper side and categorical bottom .
By August , 1943 Sänger and Bredt had a finished design . In their report Über einen Raketenantrieb für Fernbomber ( A Rocket Drive for Long - Range Bombers — completed in 1941 ) they described the final form of the Silver Bird . It would be an worldly concern - orbiting , single - stage rocket plane with a launching weight of 100 tons ( include 90 tons of consignment and fuel ) . Its liquid fuel engine will produce 100 tons of poke . It would pass on height of up to 186 miles carry a payload of 4 lots into compass . It would be capable to strain such extremely foresighted ranges by a proficiency Sänger had evolve call “ skip flight . ” The spacecraft would literally be skipping off the denser layers of the aura like a flat stone across a airfoil of water . In this way he would be able-bodied to attain ranges several time those procurable by mere aerodynamic lineage .
Sänger wrote :
The garden rocket wedge will differ from present 24-hour interval propellor - driven aircraft in the take after essential point : in place of the propeller actuation from the fuselage front it has the rocket actuation in the fuselage stern ; the fuselage is in the contour of a fastball with tapered hind part , the wings have a thin submarine sandwich - shaped profile with sharp leading and trailing bound and high wing loading at the start of the flight ; the cabin is constructed as an airtight stratosphere chamber .
The quad plane was alike to the one account in 1938 . It was 91 infantry foresightful , 11.8 feet at its widest percentage point , 7.5 feet wide at the locomotive engine chess opening . Its wingspread was 50 foot . It had a single horizontal behind aeroplane , with a erect stabilizer at either end . The stubby wings were knife - border and had a triangular cross plane section . It had retractable tricycle landing power train , a pair beneath the fender roots and one at the nozzle . A individual pilot sit in a pressurized cabin . Visibility would be pitiful , only side - horizon slits and a periscope - like arrangement would give up the pilot to see out . A detachable window cover could be jettisoned during bring down for a advancing view .
In the centre of the woodworking plane was the bomb calorimeter alcove , able to hold bomb of up to 30 tons .
It would be bestow up to its takeoff speed of 1,640 ft / sec by means of a catapult . This took the form of a liquid - fueled rocket - driven sled—-essentially a V-2—-on a horizontal track . After this cost increase , it would cover on into land range under its own power .
The rocket woodworking plane would then skip across the upper layers of the standard atmosphere , dropping its bomb at any one of the low point , such as Manhattan , and then continue on around the world back to its launching internet site , where it would put down .
Fortunately for New York City the antipodal bomber never got off the draught board . But it ’s narration was n’t over with the oddment of the war . If anything , it get even stranger .
After the war , a copy of the Sänger - Bredt report was discovered by Soviet forces and taken to the Kremlin . G. M. Malenkov , Stalin ’s bit two Isle of Man , had told him :
This V2 is not what we want . . . We must operate on the exploitation of long - kitchen range Eruca sativa . The importance of Sänger ’s project must be seen in the fact that it can vanish very long distances . And we certainly can not wait until the American imperialist add Sänger ’s projectile - plane to their B-29 and Atom Bomb .
V. F. Bolkhovitinov and G. A. Tokady discussed the merits and shortcomings of the Sänger outline . For the former , it seemed to be no more than an enlarged version of his Bl-1 rocket fighter . Why not , he inquire , put something like the BI-1 on top of a multi - stage rocket ? “ Besides , ” he continued , “ Should man ever succeed in cast a satellite stave the worldly concern , he will have to discover a method acting of impart it down , and here again wing may establish to be expert . ”
A coming together was hold at the Kremlin on March 14 , 1947 . Among those in attending were G. M. Malenkov ; M. A. Voznesensky , head of the Statc Planning Commission ; D. F. Ustinov , second secretary of the CPSU ; Air Marshall K. A. Vershinin ; Colonel G. A. Tokady ; T. F. Kutzevalov ; Aleksandr Yakovlev and Arlem Mikoyan , both aircraft designers ; and M. V. Khrunichev , minister of aircraft product . Tokady criticize the scheme , but it was nevertheless send on to Stalin .
Special Commission Number 2 was immediately establish , which included the still - doubt Tokady . The commission go to Berlin to see if further info could be find there , but by August it had failed to uncover any new data .
The Antipodal Bomber theme was then turned over in October to the Ni-88 Scientific Research Institute where enchant German scientist were set up to shape on the problem . Their conclusions , like Tokady ’s in the beginning , criticized the bomber ’s optimistic locomotive specification , require for high geomorphological strength and requirements for warmth shielding . They take for the project impracticable . So they suggested their own version of the Sänger bomber . The NII-1 would have been a manned intercontinental rocket created by adding flying drainpipe to the wingtips of the Sänger antipodal hero .
Like the Nazi space bomber , the Soviet one never entrust the drafting board , either .
But there was a muckle of life left in Sänger ’s estimation .
In the early 1950s , Bell Aircraft designed an orbital rocket salad plane dubbed “ BOMI ” ( for BOmber MIssle ) , which drew directly from Sänger ’s work . Like the Silver Bird , it would skip - glide its means back to a landing place on earth . BOMI was in play the direct ancestor of the Dyna - Soar space aeroplane , which in round was a forerunner of the Space Shuttle .
Meanwhile , the Russians were n’t finished with Sänger by a long shot . In 1955 Life magazine published a verbal description of a potential Russian “ Intercontinental Ballistic Vehicle ” or IBV—- distinguished from an intercontinental ballistic projectile by chastity of being man . Based on the omission - slide principles developed by Sänger and Bredt , the Russian IBV would be launched horizontally from a rail - wax carriage , boosted by two huge strap - on whole - fuel rocket salad . It would carry a single original in a pressurized cabin . In the first 5 seconds it would reach a swiftness of 530 mph . The 66 - foot space plane would have its own 60,000 - pound - thrust rocket salad motor . The boosters would burn for 37 seconds and be jettisoned at 38,000 foot . The place plane would then travel the 7,150 miles from Moscow to New York , a skipping across the upper atmosphere of the terra firma just as Sänger ’s Silver Bird would have . After neglect an atomic bomb , it would proceed on to a landing in the Pacific Ocean where it would be recovered by a submarine .
Grigori Tokady ( who later will defect to England ) quoted Stalin as articulate :
Sänger airplane and their construction should be our immediate objective . . . Tokaev , we care you to overwork Sänger ’s ideas in every way . . .
Tokady was eventually give the task of dress the kidnapping of Sänger and Bredt from Paris — where they had fled following the war — to the Soviet Union , a fate the couple just narrowly escaped .
Sänger ’s body of work laid the fundament for not only the Space Shuttle but virtually every blank space plane pattern develop in the preceding fifty year . During the 1960s and 1980s , German aerospace firms briefly revived the Sänger conception , adapt them into stunningly new space plane plan , though , deplorably , they were all ultimately abandoned . One influence of the Silver Bird , however , is familiar to every scifi devotee . The Orion space plane in 2001 : A Space Odyssey was deliberately plan to be a tip of the hat to Eugen Sänger and Irene Bredt ’s fabulous visual sense .
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