Nazi space program conspirancy: shuttle!
Few people know, but the Nazis had in the project shuttle for suborbital flight! Long before the conquest of space!
Silbervogel: Wind tunnel model of the Silver bird
The Silver Bird was a design for a sub-orbital bomber with a wingspan of 15 meters and a length of 28 meters, which was created in the late 1930s by Eugen Sänger and Irene Sänger-Bredt.
The design is sometimes referred to as "America Bomber", although he was only one of the designs for this mission. When Walter Dornberger in the US tried after the Second World War, to raise a military interest in spaceships, he chose the diplomatic designation antipodal bomber (Antipodes bomber of Greek opposite number, which corresponds to any point on the Earth on the other side meant opposing point is).
aim
The draft was remarkable because it took advantage of new missile technologies and the principle of a slider. At the end of the design was considered too complex and expensive for an implementation. There was only wind tunnel tests.
The silver bird should realize long-haul flights with the help of a series of short hops. The airplane should be accelerated at the beginning of his mission along a 3 km long railway track by a rocket-propelled sled. Once started, it should have its own rockets ignite and rise to an altitude of 145 km, in which it would have flown at a speed of 22,100 km / h. Then it should gradually descend into the stratosphere, where the higher air density would generate lift on the flat underside of the aircraft, eventually brought to "jump" and a greater altitude would have to increase it. Thereupon, the process would be repeated. Because of air resistance every jump would have been smaller than the previous. However, it was calculated that the silver bird would have been able to cross the Atlantic to drop a 4,000-kg bomb on the American continent and then his flight to landing continue somewhere in the Japanese part of the Pacific - a journey of 24,000 km.
In postwar analyzes, an error in the calculation of aerodynamic heating during re-entry was found. The recalculation revealed that the silver bird would burn up without course correction during reentry. Still, it was not impossible to solve this problem, and after the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union showed interest in the singer work.
Technical development
In the US, the project of the origin of the later discontinued X-20 Dyna-Soar was a more developed from the Silver Bird aircraft which should be started with a Titan II rocket. As the manned space thing NASA was, the Air Force gradually withdrew from manned space flight, and the Dyna-Soar was adjusted.
Stalin was fascinated by the concept and tried singer to be kidnapped in the USSR, so he continued working on the draft. When this plan failed, was founded in 1946 by Mstislav Vsevolodovich Keldysh a new development office for further exploration of the concept. A new version, which was powered by a ramjet engine (also known as the Keldysh bomber) has been developed, but not built. The design formed the basis for a number of new cruise missile designs in the early 1960s, but they were also not implemented.
A final element of the remaining silver Bird Design is the "regenerating Motor", wherein the fuel or the oxidizer is introduced into the combustion chamber and exhaust nozzle pipes in order to cool on the one hand, these parts and on the other to warm up the fuel. Almost all modern liquid rocket engines use this style. Some sources refer to this style is still as a singer-Bredt design.