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See... http://www.luft46.com/misc/sanger.html Note the engine details. There is a jet engine fuelled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen, piped through the jet bell, so it gets cooled and the fuel gets vapourized. Neat, eh? Clever guys, those Germans.

It's a copy of the BV P202. Here is a link. http://www.luft46.com/bv/bvp202.html

And this should get me something for "informative", if anything does!

You are correct, this is a sixty-two year old idea: http://www.luft46.com/bv/bvp202.html And NASA had the Oblique Wing aircraft they flight tested in the 1970's: http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/Photo/AD-1/

Here's a link to an actual Nazi-era blueprint. Lot's of other cool desings in the page. A lot of the good ones were used by the US lately, such as the B2.

Taking a step back? Of course we're taking a step back.

Your argument appears to be that because it's bigger it's better. The Russians stayed with the original in-line rocket concept, and now we're admitting they were right. The Shuttle has not lived up to any of it's promises, and has proved to be a death-trap. I wonder how many years we have to wait before all those involved leave the scene, and we can finally admit that the Shuttle was a large mistake, instead of pretending that it was the best space vehicle ever designed.

Incidentally, I suspect that wings can be used to slow a spacecraft down safely, so long as you take a bit of time about it and go a few times round the world. The Space Shuttle was designed for a comparatively steep reentry, so as not to overfly hostile cold war countries and stay within the bounds of the continental US. If we look at the Sanger machine ( http://www.luft46.com/misc/sanger.html - see the flight profile, or http://forums.x-plane.org/lofiversion/index.php/t1 1159.html ) or the work of Terence Nonweiler ( http://www.aerospaceweb.org/design/waverider/waver ider.shtml ) we can see that skipping on the surface of the atmosphere is a credible braking manoever.

Are you talking about the Sanger Silverbird? That's the only design that I've seen that had two parts, and the "pusher" was strictly ground-bound. I'd be very interested in a link to any information on the design you're talking about.

"I couldn't see this doing much for manned flight, but most of what we send up isn't manned anyway. It could also have some pretty kick ass millitary application, say for dramatically increasing the payload of current rocket propelled artillery rounds."

Funnily enough, studies about that go back a long way, circa 1930. dr.Sanger eventually studied a Ramjet powered design, a model of which is in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. It would have been a cheaper alternative to the Space Shuttle, with a mother vehicle starting from a plain aerodrome and an orbital vehicle piggybacking on it. Basically the mother vehicle is the same concept inferred for the mysterious project Aurore Recce aircraft.

The military have always been attracted to these concepts, witness the Dynasoar in the late fifties, but the rationale is the same for civilian uses; higher efficiency and flexibility in bringing payloads in low earth orbit or suborbital flight.

1) Sanger Amerika Bomber (~1938)
2) DynaSoar aka X20 (~1960) book about it here
3) Soviet Equivalents (~1960)
4) Numerous "black" projects here
5) Ever wondered who paid for the Space Shuttle ?

There are sure to have been many projects between 1 & 2.

Finding information on the rest of the above is left as an exercise for the reader ;-)

As long as there has been transportation sytems there have been military applications.

K

Would this be completely unconnected with the Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle (Falcon) concept? DARPA's idea for a global hypersonic bomber that could pre-emptively bomb a country back to stone age before Letterman.

Still, the Germans beat DARPA to this idea by about 60 years - meet the Sanger Amerika bomber... an aircraft that would fly right around the planet skipping off the atmosphere like a stone thrown across a pond.

Best wishes,
Mike.

I don't have every answer, but here are a few facts:

You've got it right on the heat dissipation, though I mentioned that more to address comments that all the heat would be "taken" along the leading edges of the wings, which isn't the case even though they do tend to get pretty hot - which you can see in infrared pictures of the Shuttle as it descends.

This isn't an orbital vehicle, no. A flight will take around half an hour and it'll reach an altitude of 100km or so - across the official space boundary, but it won't stay there long. A lot more fuel would be required to reach orbital velocity, and a lot more heat shielding to make it back.

Re-entry profiles are usually "corridors" only a few degrees wide; come in too shallow, and you skip off the atmosphere; too steep, and you're crushed by G forces. The exact profile differs from design to design, I'd imagine.

Most of the envelope is determined by fuel and the shape of your ship. Amazing things can be done by designing your vehicle well and taking advantage of physics... take a look at the Sanger skip bomber", a suborbital craft designed to fly once around the world and make an unpowered glide landing, "skipping" off the atmosphere like a stone off water.

Notice how flat the underside of the spacecraft is ...

The V-173 had a top airspeed of 500 MPH and a landing speed of 10 MPH.

It wasn't quite *that* good, but it did have a remarkably low stall speed.

These were indeed weird beasts - I looked up the "flying flapjacks" in the archives when I worked for LTV in the 1980's, as well as the Cutlass, which was a conglomeration of German design features that was a decade or two ahead of its time, and arguably the most successful failure in naval aviation history - the list of firsts racked up by that plane are truly impressive, even though it failed operationally.

If you want a look at "future" aviation technology we *were* reverse engineering after WWII, forget UFOs and concentrate on the Germans: Luft46.com is a real eye-opener - had the war lasted another year, Germany would have filled the sky with jets that the Allies couldn't match until a decade later, not to mention the stealth fighter-bombers, guided air-to-air missiles, rocket planes, and the atmosphere-skipping Sanger "Amerika Bomber". Impressive. And scary. Thank God that Hitler was foolish enough to try to fight in the Russian winter, or we'd all be speaking German...

Here is a link to an info page on the Saenger design, with many more other strange concepts in the parent pages. take a look, it's fascinating.

Thanks for the info MtViewGuy - and for others interested there are some interesting photos and info here and here and a directory listing here.

Thanks for the info MtViewGuy - and for others interested there are some interesting photos and info here and here and a directory listing here.

Thanks for the info MtViewGuy - and for others interested there are some interesting photos and info here and here and a directory listing here.

The Germans came frighteningly close to establishing complete control of the skies with jet aircraft, rockets, hybrids of the two, and atomic weapons. Fortunately, in the latter area, they were not on the right track, but there is some evidence that they had built a small but effective breeder reactor by the end of the war.

Here are a few sites that point out their capabilities toward the end of the war - they were literally decades ahead in some areas, and one could argue we still haven't caught up in others....

Luft46.Com A site giving an unprecedented insight in to what the German Luftwaffe might have looked like had the war in Europe continued for another year or so. There were incredible things in the works - the world's first stealth fighter-bomber, the first guided missiles, dozens of extremely advanced jet aircraft designs, the atmoshpheric skipping SAnger Amerika bomber, and more. This one can be a significantly enjoyable time sink. You've been warned. (Don't miss the "Luft Art" section showing many very skillful renderings of these superplanes.)

John Walker's "Rocket-a-Day" Paper Read this to get a feel for the truly incredible capabilities of the German A4/V2 program, and an eye-opening comparison the the incredibly inefficient way we get things in to space today. This is particularly relevant in the wake of the Columbia disaster. NASA needs to die, and this paper points out one big reason why.

Germany created and flew the first jet fighters.

True, and the first rocket fighter, the Messerschmitt Me-263 `Komet' and later the Bachem Be349 `Natter'.

Unfortunately for them, the war was almost over already.

That wasn't the problem. The problem was that Hitler was a gonzo and first prevaricated, then ordered that they be built for bombing - which they were mediocre at, rather than air defense - which they were good at. Mind you, some of the big Yank prop planes could still catch them and shoot them down with a diving start.

Commercial jets are descended from those planes.

No, commercial jets were quite different in design from the start. The British Meteor jet fighters did look quite similar to the 262. However, many of our modern rockets are descended in one way or another from the V2.

The really innovative German 'planes were the Blohm und Voss models. My personal favourites are the asymmetrical 237 and mid-engined mid-propped 192, although other models like the 111 and 170 have their own special shock value too. (-:

There is large support from some for the full development of a Blended Wing Body (BWB) airliner, and there are significant arguements for that development. The concept is over 50 years old (Northrop), the current design is at least 10 years old (acquired when Boeing bought McDonnell), and an implementation exists as the B-2 stealh bomber.

Good comment, but a couple of corrections: First, the BWB concept is far older than 50 years, and was pioneered by Vincent Burnelli in the 1930s, not McDonnell-Douglas in the 90s. Northrup was undoubtedly among the real pioneers (along with the Hortens and Lippisch in Germany, both of whom predated much of Northrup's work) in true flying wings, but there's a distiction between flying wings or nurflugels and BWBs or airfoil-body designs like Burnelli's (which have a notable lack of blending...)

For more good information on these vehicles, check out the following links from my own bookmarks collection on this topic:

The Nurflugel (German for "flying wing" more or less) Page: Great info on historical flying wing designs, and the difficulties that the problem posed for so long.

Aircrash.org: A good site about the Burnelli wing/body design and it's history. Unfortunately it's marred by repeated and rather shrill accusations of a giant conspiracy to keep aircraft unsafe. A good resource, but there are more than a few sour grapes here. Too bad, becuase the idea has obvious merit.

Luft46.com: A site that catalogs many of the incredibly advanced and innovative aircraft that the Germans were working on (in in many cases beginning prodction of) at the end of WWII. The Horten 229 (known variously as Ho IX, Ho229, and Gotha 229) is an interesting comparison to the current B2. Not only was it a fairly high-performance jet-powered flying wing fighter/bomber, but the German engineers had already begun researching stealth: its body was made of carbon granules sandwiched between two thin plywood skins, forming the first know radar-absorbing aerostructure. (One warning though: don't blame me if you spend all your Christmas holidays reading this site. There's some amazing stuff here, and it tends to be a pretty engrossing once you get into it a bit...)

Now that the Sonic Cruiser has been canned, it will be interesting to see if the other (r)evolutionary design, the BWB, gains traction and sees a greater chance of production.

Indeed. I worked on the GE Unducted Fan in the mid 80's, and there is a LOT of room for improvement in current designs. Even the UDF itself might have made it had they paid a high-schooler's attention to basic physics: The UDF had two rows of either 8 or 10 counterrotating blades. As is entirely predictable, the thing made a very effective siren when running, and the acoustic and air-impulse energy literally beat the adjacent body skins nearly to death. Why this problem didn't occur to GE when they know enough to always use a prime number of blades in turbine sections is beyond me...

Anyone looking for information on the Sanger spaceplane (which both Dyna-Soar and its Soviet equivalent were influenced by) should try here.

Actually, anyone interested in aerospace "what if"s might find the site that's on kinda interesting - lots of information on what Nazi Germany had waiting in the wings towards the end of the war - had the war gone on longer and Germany's industry not been pretty much reduced to rubble by that point. Simultaneously fascinating and frightening.