Silbervogel

The main purpose of the bomber-rocket plane is to bombard the United States and, in particular, New York , and the distant industrial regions of the USSR , in particular, the Urals and Siberia .

According to estimates, the “Silver Bird” was supposed to carry up to 30 tons of bombs. The weight of the bomb load depended on the distance, with an estimated distance of 6500 km from New York, the bomb load was 6 tons.

In 1941, the project was temporarily closed, like all ambitious projects that did not imply immediate returns.

By the end of World War II (in 1944 ), the project revived, acquiring the status of “ weapons of retaliation ”. Nevertheless, its almost complete impracticability in the situation at that time was obvious even to the German command, and the work on the project did not advance beyond the outline drawings.

According to post-war calculations, ^[1] the Zenger apparatus, in principle, could not function, as the inventor had expected, and would be destroyed at the very first entry into the atmosphere.

The length of the bomber is 28 m, the wingspan is about 15 m, the dry weight is 10 tons, the fuel weight is 84 tons. The total starting weight of the bomber is about 100 tons. The bomber rocket engine developed by Zenger himself without the help of the Dornberger group was supposed to develop thrust up to 100 tons.

The bomber was supposed to launch from an ejection unit up to 3 kilometers long. The “Silver Bird” was located on the launch carriage (slide), which was driven by its own rocket engines along with the aircraft attached to them. After 10 seconds of operation, the speed of the bomber on the launch trolley should have been about 500 m / s. After that, pyro bolts worked, the bomber detached from the cart and, gaining altitude, turned on its own rocket engine 36 seconds after launch at a distance of about 12 km from the take-off point. The operation of the liquid propellant rocket engine should have lasted 336 seconds before running out of fuel.

The theoretical maximum flight altitude calculated by Dr. Zenger was 260 km and the aircraft speed was 6400 m / s. The plane actually took off into the airless space of near space , and the pilot briefly became an astronaut.

There were several options for using a space bomber.

The first version of the flight mode

According to the first version, the bomber launched in Germany , then, going out into space along a falling ballistic trajectory, reached the point of bombing, and then, having flown this point, landed on the opposite point of Germany from the Earth. This "antipodal" point falls on the area of New Zealand or Australia , controlled by the Allies. In this case, the rocket plane would inevitably be lost along with the pilot. In addition, bombing according to this option would have to be carried out from a very high altitude, which would be ineffective in the accuracy of hitting the target. Compact and effective guidance systems for shells at that time were not. The first experiments in this direction had only just begun at the FAU-1/2, but the accuracy of their systems only allowed them to "get to London."

Second Flight Mode Option

According to another option, the bomber reached the point of bombing, carried out the bombing, and then turned 180 degrees and returned to the starting point. The rocket plane at launch was supposed to reach a speed of 6370 m / s and a height of 91 km. In this mode of flight along a ballistic trajectory at a distance of about 5500 km from the launch point, the velocity of the rocket plane would fall to 6000 m / s, and the flight altitude would decrease to 50 km. After another 950 km, bombing was carried out, after which the plane for 330 seconds with a radius of 500 km made a turn back and headed to the launch site. The speed after exiting the turn would be 3,700 m / s, and the altitude would be 38 km. At a distance of 100 km from the landing site in Germany, the aircraft speed was 300 m / s, altitude - 20 km. Subsequent planning and landing took place like a conventional aircraft with a landing speed of only 140 km / h.

Third Flight Mode Option

Zenger intended to use the “wave-like planning” mode, reminiscent of the movement of a stone reflected during a throw from water, and making “pancakes”. When planning from space, the rocket plane had to bounce (ricochet) several times from the dense layers of the atmosphere, thereby significantly lengthening the distance of a possible flight.

To obtain such a flight regime, the rocket plane would have to gain a maximum speed of 7000 m / s to an altitude of 280 kilometers, at a distance of 3,500 kilometers from the launch point, make the first decrease and "bounce from the atmosphere" at an altitude of 40 kilometers at 6,750 kilometers from the launch point. The ninth planning and “rebound” would be already at a distance of 27,500 kilometers from the starting point. 3 hours 40 minutes after the launch, completely circling the Earth, the rocket plane landed at the airfield in Germany, arriving from the back of the launch site. The estimated bombing point would be on one of the declines to the surface of the earth.

Other flight modes were also considered, including with the landing of a bomber in the territory of Germany-friendly countries or the bombing with the loss of an airplane and the bailout of a pilot with his capture. In the mode of diving a bomber at a target, followed by pilot bailout, the highest accuracy of bombing could be achieved.

A number of sources claim that Stalin showed interest in this project. Information is given that he instructed his son Vasily and the scientist Grigory Tokaev to capture Senger and transfer him to the Soviet Union ^{[2] [3]} . However, these plans did not succeed right away (Tokaev fled abroad and told the British intelligence everything he knew about the Soviet missile program, according to him, Stalin showed particular interest in intercontinental missiles and ultra-long-range jet bombers, Zenger’s ideas were especially interesting to him) ^{[ 4] [5]} and were canceled later, and Senger lived and worked in France, England, Switzerland, Germany.

According to the results of the study of German drawings of the Silver Bird project in the USSR in 1965, under the leadership of G. E. Lozino-Lozinsky , the development of its own horizontally launching and landing but two-stage military multipurpose ACS bomber and the delivery of crew and cargo into orbit Spiral began remaining unrealized.

In the United States, the first similar-to-purpose and also unrealized military space system of the 1960s X-20 was based, however, on a vertical launch by a conventional launch vehicle . An experimental hypersonic X-15 aircraft was launched , starting from another carrier aircraft . Projects of single-stage ACS spacecraft ( X-30-NASP and others) have not yet been implemented.

In Germany in the 1990s and 2000s there was, but the project of the two-stage ACS Zenger-2 with horizontal launch and landing was canceled before the stage of practical implementation. Then in the UK , an unrealized project was developed for the horizontally launching single-stage ACS HOTOL , in one version of which a launch from a catapult, like that of the Silver Bird, was supposed.

• Weapon of retaliation
• X-20 Dyna Soar
• Spiral (aerospace system)
• Senger-2
• Spaceliner

• Kozyrev M., Kozyrev V. Unusual weapons of the Third Reich. - M.: Tsentrpoligraf, 2007.
• Katorin Yu.F. , Volkovsky N.L. ,Tarnavsky V.V. Unique and paradoxical military equipment. - SPb. : Polygon, 2003 .-- 686 p. - (Military Historical Library). - ISBN 5-59173-238-6 , UDC 623.4, LBC 68.8 K 29.