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Rockets and People
In modern-day Germany, they have designed an aerospace system that is called
“Sänger” in honor of the pioneer of this idea. The largest German aircraft firms
participated in the work on this program.The spacecraft was designed on the basis
of forward-looking, but realizable technology and was intended to transport various
cargoes into space while lowering costs and ensuring safety, reliability, and allpurpose
use. It differs fundamentally from the 1940s design in that horizontal
acceleration is not achieved by a catapult, but by a special booster aircraft that
carries the actual spacecraft, which will be capable of inserting 10 metric tons of
payload into near-Earth orbit—the same amount specified in Sänger’s original
design—at an altitude of up to 300 kilometers. Working in 1944, Eugen Sänger
certainly could not have imagined the materials, engines, and navigation and
control methods that German scientists with access to advanced space technologies
are working on now.
In 1947, in conversations with Gröttrup, we were trying to determine Peenemünde’s
attitude toward Sänger’s design during the war.The gist of his response was
something like the following: First, the consensus was that work on Sänger’s design
might hinder the A-4 program and the other programs at Peenemünde that were
purely rocket-oriented.Second,they believed that such a design would require at least
four to five years of intense work before the first flight; and third, it was an aircraft—
the design interested the Luftwaffe,but rocket technology was under the management
of the infantry command. Even here institutional partiality was at work!
It is interesting to compare the different assessments of the development cycle for
the Sänger aircraft. Peenemünde estimated up to five years, while G. N.Abramovich’s
subsequent assessment was up to ten years.The present Germany began work on the
“Sänger” in 1986 and scheduled the first demonstration flight for 1999—a thirteenyear
development cycle! And this was more than fifty years after Isayev’s group
extracted the top-secret report from the woodpile. Currently, work on the project
has been practically halted due to the European Space Agency’s lack of funding.
Though Eugen Sänger would never see an aircraft bearing his name, he nevertheless
received international recognition during his lifetime. In 1950, he was
elected the first president of the International Academy of Astronautics, and in
1962 the USSR Academy of Sciences awarded him the Yuriy Gagarin Medal.
In Peenemünde, there was serious work underway on another large cruise
missile. By December 1944, the territory of Germany had been invaded by the
Red Army from the east and the Allies from the west.The defeat of the Nazis was
inevitable. Nevertheless, the stubborn specialists in Peenemünde launched an A-9
cruise missile under the designation A-4b on 27 December.The launch was unsuccessful.
From our vantage point today, the failure can be easily explained—it was
simply unavoidable, the knowledge and experience to realize this design did not
exist. They started this work with the particular courage that comes with ignorance.
The time for the realization of such designs had not yet come, especially
since it was already too late to be working on them in Peenemünde. One had only
to glance at a map of the military situation.
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