When the Nazis Tried to Build a Space Shuttle

Описание: On December 8, 1941, the day after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour, the United States declared war on the Empire of Japan. Three days later on December 11, Japan’s ally Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. This was to prove a major strategic blunder for the Nazis, for not only was the United States the greatest industrial power in the world, but its geographic isolation from both Germany and Japan made it nearly invulnerable to enemy attack. While the U-boats of the German Kriegsmarine scored impressive victories against Allied shipping early in the war, by 1943 the sheer volume of merchant vessels being churned out by American shipyards plus advancements in antisubmarine technology and tactics had all but secured Allied supremacy over the Atlantic. After that, the only way America could be attacked was from the air - something no existing German aircraft was capable of. This, however, did not stop the Nazis from trying, and throughout the war German engineers came up with a variety of ambitious designs for a so-called Amerikabomber - an aircraft capable of flying 6,000 kilometres from Germany to New York City and taking the fight to the enemy. While most of these designs consisted of giant, multi-engined bombers, one proposal stood out among the rest. Impressively prophetic, this design was so fantastically advanced that a vehicle of its type would not be successfully flown for another four decades. This is the story of Silbervogel, the Nazi space shuttle that never was.

Since the earliest days of science fiction, most writers assumed that future spacecraft would be similar to sailing ships or other aircraft: large reusable vehicles that could fly to and from space multiple times before needing to be repaired or overhauled. Though theoretically this approach permits enormous cost savings over single-use spacecraft, in practice the added complexity of designing a reusable spaceplane nearly always outweighs these savings. Consequently, over the past 60 years, most astronauts have travelled into space aboard simple, single-use ballistic capsules. However, this has not deterred designers from trying to crack the problem of reusable spacecraft, and among the first to tackle this challenge was a German engineer named Eugen Sänger.

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