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