Space shuttles. The beginning: German brainiacs, an orbital bomber for Hitler, and an American plane in space

In fact, this article was written five years ago and was supposed to be the first part of a large material about space shuttles – old, new and future. But it so happened that the third and fourth parts – about the Boeing X-37 and its clones and the Dream Chaser and other civilian space shuttle projects – were published earlier. But better late than never, so we offer you a story about how the concept of spaceplanes appeared and the people who stood at its origins. And this story began almost 100 years ago, on June 11, 1928, on Mount Wasserkuppe in central Germany.

German thugs

So, June 11, 1928, Wasserkuppe, Germany. After the first false start, which upset the test participants, test pilot Fritz Stamer finally lifts the Lippisch Ente glider into the air, equipped with two solid-fuel (black powder) rocket engines designed by Friedrich Sander with a thrust of 0.1962 kN each. The engines are regularly fired one after the other for 30 seconds and the RRG Raketen-Ente circles the Wasserkuppe landing strip, flying about 1,500 m. This was the first flight of a rocket plane - an aircraft with a rocket engine.

Unfortunately, the second launch was unsuccessful. When attempting to simultaneously ignite both rockets, thereby increasing the initial impulse, one of the engines exploded, making a hole in the wing, the glider fell to the ground from a height of 20 meters and burned up.

Interesting people who participated in this test. The Lippisch Ente tailless glider, built according to the "duck" scheme (Ente - "duck" in German), was created by designer Alexander Lippisch, a pioneer in the development of "flying wing" aircraft, delta-wing aircraft and ekranoplanes, the creator of the unique Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet missile fighter-interceptor. After the war, he took part in the development of the first jet aircraft with a delta wing – the Convair XF-92, which formed the basis of such combat vehicles as the F-102 Delta Dagger, F-106 Delta Dart and B-58 Hustler.

The testing and purchase of the glider was sponsored by Fritz von Opel, nicknamed "Rocket Fritz", a daredevil and grandson of Adam Opel, the founder of the Opel company. Together with Fritz von Opel and Friedrich Sander, Max Wallier, an Austrian pioneer of rocket technology, one of the founders of the German Space Travel Society and author of the book "Rocket Flight: A Technical Possibility" / Raketenfahrt: eine technische Möglichkeit, also came to Mount Wasserkuppe in the summer of 1928. Max Wallier, together with Opel, tested cars with Opel-RAK jet engines (speed record – 254 km/h) and died in 1930 during a bench test.

Despite the loss of the first rocket plane in 1928, Fritz von Opel did not give up and hired aircraft designer Julius Guthrie to create a new rocket-powered aircraft. The result was a typical seaplane of the time, but now with 16 Sander powder boosters, each with a thrust of 0.4875 kN (total thrust – 7.8 kN).

On September 30, 1929, Opel presented the plane to the public and personally piloted it. The rocket plane, which was called the Opel RAK.1, flew 3 km, reaching a speed of 153 km/h, and this was with only 5 of the 16 rockets working. Then a gust of wind threw the plane to the ground and it made a hard landing at a speed of 129 km/h. Fritz von Opel survived, but lost his talent for rocket planes. Later, he fled from the Nazis and, despite his reputation as a daredevil, lived to be 71 in the United States and Switzerland.

Let's return to our rocket planes, the direct ancestors of space planes, and therefore the Space Shuttle and the new generation shuttles. But first, we ask readers to distinguish between rocket jet engines, in which thrust is created during the combustion of fuel and oxidizer with the subsequent ejection of the working fluid through a jet nozzle, and air-jet engines – turbojet and ramjet air-jet engines, capable of operating only in the Earth's atmosphere, because the working fluid in them is a mixture of atmospheric air pumped by a turbine, or due to the resistance of the environment and the products of fuel combustion. Most aircraft are equipped with air-jet engines, while rockets and rocket planes use rocket jet engines.

World War II intensified the development of rocket planes. On June 20, 1939, Erich Warzitz flew the Heinkel He 176, the first aircraft with a liquid-fueled jet engine. The aforementioned Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet, designed by Lippisch, whose first flight took place on September 1, 1941 at the same Peenemünde rocket range where the V-2 ballistic missile was tested and where people first launched an artificial object into space, became the first mass-produced rocket plane - by the end of the war, about 370 aircraft had been assembled.

Despite the large number of aircraft, they had little effect on the outcome of the fighting. Only a few sorties were flown, during which the Me 163 shot down between 9 and 18 Allied aircraft, losing 10 aircraft. Many more Me 163s were damaged during tests and pilot training.

The Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet used a two-component HWK 109-509A-2 engine (oxidizer – hydrogen peroxide, fuel – a mixture of methanol and hydrazine hydrate), which developed a maximum thrust of 14.71 kN and was able to operate for up to 450 seconds. The Me 163 held the unofficial air speed record for a decade – 1,130 km/h, which was set by test pilot Heini Dittmar in July 1944.

In the same 1944-45 years. Imperial Japan built 852 rocket planes for kamikaze – Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka. In fact, these were manned cruise missiles with a fairly short flight range – about 37 km. The carriers were Mitsubishi G4M2e bombers. Despite the significant warhead of 1,200 kg, the use of the MXY-7 Ohka did not have a special effect, these planes did not sink a single large US ship.

Other participants in the conflict did not lag behind, although it did not reach serial production. In the USSR, on May 15, 1942, the Bereznyak-Isayev BI-1 rocket fighter took to the air. On April 23, 1945, the North American P-51 Mustang fighter with auxiliary rocket engines was tested in the USA, which allowed to increase the speed of the aircraft by 100 km/h, accelerating it to 828 km/h.

Silbervogel – an orbital bomber for Hitler

The most interesting of the early rocket-spaceplane designs is the Silbervogel (German for "silver bird") by Eugen Senger and Irene Senger-Bredt. The Silbervogel, also known as the Amerikabomber, Orbital-Bomber, Antipodal-Bomber, Atmosphere Skipper, Ural-Bomber and RaBo (Raketenbomber – German for "rocket bomber"), is the first detailed design of a hypersonic aircraft and aerospace system in general.

Developed as part of the Amerikabomber program, a project to create a strategic bomber capable of striking targets in the United States from German territory, the Silbervogel used an aerodynamic scheme with a fuselage that creates lift, which was later developed in the projects of the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar spaceplane (1959) and the experimental aircraft M2-F3, HL-10 and X-24A (1966–1973), the tests of which laid the foundation for the Space Shuttle program.

Silbervogel was to be launched from a railway jet catapult, which would accelerate it to a speed of 1,930 km/h. Then, jet engines would be turned on, which would throw the "Silver Bird" into space, to an altitude of 145 km, where it would reach a maximum theoretical speed of 21,800 km/h.

On the descent trajectory, the spaceplane was supposed to bounce off the dense layers of the atmosphere due to aerodynamic drag and the lifting properties of the hull and, as a result of several such jumps, reach US territory, where it would bomb. According to calculations, the bomb load was about 4,000 kg, and the Silbervogel could land somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, in territory controlled by Japan.

Post-war analysis of the Silbervogel project, rejected in 1941 by the Reich Ministry of Aviation due to its complexity (a simplified project was approved in 1944, but was never implemented), showed that Senger and Bradt had made a mistake in calculating the heating of the spaceship during entry into the dense layers of the atmosphere. It was impossible to preserve the integrity of the device without the use of modern heat shields.

After the war, Senger and Bredt worked for the French government and helped found the International Astronautical Federation, a non-governmental, non-profit scientific organization concerned with the peaceful exploration and exploitation of space, as well as with rocketry and space law. In 1951, Eugen Senger became the first president of the IFA.

There is a version that Joseph Stalin, interested in the Silbervogel project, authorized the kidnapping of Zenger. The escape to the West of the Soviet rocket engineer Grigory Tokayev thwarted these plans. Later, Tokayev, under the name Grigory Tokati, participated in the American Mercury and Apollo programs and became a professor at the University of London. Supposedly, the works of Zenger captured by the USSR were transferred to Mstislav Keldysh and became the basis for the design of a similar Soviet orbital reconnaissance/bomber - the aerospace system "Spiral" (1964–1974).

Interestingly, later "Spiral" pushed the development of the American project HL-20 Personnel Launch System and the commercial shuttle Dream Chaser created on its basis.

Another descendant of the "Silver Bird" was the Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm Sänger project, a two-stage reusable spaceplane developed in West Germany. Work on the concept had been ongoing since the mid-1960s, and in June 1985, the ESA (European Space Agency) officially presented the Sänger project, which competed with the similar French shuttle Hermes and the British HOTOL, which were also being developed at the time. As a result, neither project was implemented. In 1995, funding for the Sänger was terminated in favor of the disposable Ariane 5 launch vehicles.

And just a few words about Eugen Senger. After returning to Germany in 1957, he worked on the design of a photon engine and the use of powerful lasers to accelerate ships during interplanetary and interstellar missions. Eugen Senger foresaw the concept of laser jet engines and solar sails that appeared later.

North American X-15 – a plane in space

The first rocket plane to reach space was the North American X-15 experimental aircraft. During flights No. 90 (July 19, 1963) and No. 91 (August 22, 1963), test pilot Joseph Walker lifted the X-15 to altitudes of 105.9 and 107.8 km, respectively, above the Kármán line (100 km), the official boundary of space. This record for spaceplanes lasted for more than 40 years and was only broken on October 4, 2004, by Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne, which reached an altitude of 112 km and won the Ansari X Prize.

In total, Joseph Walker spent 22 minutes in space, but he was not certified as an astronaut until August 2005, 39 years after his death in a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. The USS Shenzhou, a ship in the Star Trek: Discovery series on which Philippa Georgiou and Michael Burnham served, is a Walker-class starship named in honor of Joseph Walker.

In the United States, the limit of space is set at 50 miles, or 80,467 m. During 13 flights, 8 North American X-15 pilots exceeded this altitude and received the title of astronaut. Five military pilots were recognized as astronauts in the 1960s, three civilian pilots – William Dana, Joseph Walker (posthumously) and John McKay (posthumously) received their "wings" only in 2005.

In addition to altitude records, the North American X-15 also set several speed records. On October 3, 1967, William Knight accelerated his X-15 to 7,274 km/h at an altitude of 31 km. However, this record was not recognized by the FAI, and the current aircraft speed record holder is the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, which reached 3,529.6 km/h on July 28, 1976.

The group of pilots selected for testing the North American X-15 can be considered the first set of astronauts in human history – this unit, which was enrolled without a special selection procedure, was formed in 1957. The first "real" US astronaut unit was formed on June 25, 1958, the USSR cosmonaut unit on March 7, 1960.

Two of the X-15 pilots went to space on other missions – Neil Armstrong (7 flights on the X-15) became the first man on the Moon, and Joe Henry Engle (16 flights on the X-15) tested the Space Shuttle and was the commander of the STS-2 and STS-51-I missions.

The X-15 concept, like the Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar orbital reconnaissance/bomber that was being developed at the same time, belongs to the German engineer, Major General Walter Dornberger. It was he who created the Peenemünde test site and led the group that developed the V-2 rocket, on which, in fact, the entire American and Soviet space programs were built.

After the war, after serving a prison sentence in Great Britain, Dornberger was taken to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip, where he worked for Bell Aircraft Corporation, rising to the rank of vice president of the company. He developed the first American cruise missile, the GAM-63 RASCAL, capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, and it was Dornberger's ideas that formed the basis of the Space Shuttle program. Although in Germany Dornberger was Wernher von Braun's superior, in the United States they had differences and worked independently of each other.

Like the GAM-63 RASCAL mentioned above, the North American X-15 rocket plane was essentially a cruise missile with small delta wings and a tail fin. Interestingly, in terms of dimensions and thrust, the X-15 was not much different from... the same V-2.

The airframe was designed by North American Aviation (now part of Boeing), the makers of the P-51 Mustang fighter, a jet-powered version of which was tested in 1945. The engine was provided by Reaction Motors (now part of Northrop Grumman). A single XLR99-RM-2 engine (used in the later stages of testing), fueled by liquid ammonia and liquid oxygen, developed 313 kN of thrust and could operate for 227 seconds (compare with 0.1962 kN and 30 seconds for the first RRG Raketen-Ente rocket plane).

The X-15, like many other experimental US aircraft or modern Orbital Sciences Corporation Pegasus or Virgin Orbit LauncherOne launch vehicles, was dropped from a carrier aircraft. The air launch took place at an altitude of approximately 13.7 km at a speed of 805 km/h. Modified Boeing B-52 Stratofortress bombers – NB-52A The High and Mighty One and NB-52A The Challenger nicknamed Balls 8 – were used as platforms. Balls 8 served NACA/NASA for over 50 years, participated in many tests and was retired on December 17, 2004, becoming a monument at the entrance to Edwards Air Force Base in California.

A total of three North American X-15s were built, and they flew 199 times between March 10, 1959 and December 12, 1968. Surprisingly, given the experimental nature of the program, its high speeds, and its technological shortcomings, the X-15 suffered only a few accidents, only one of which was fatal. On November 15, 1967, during test flight #191, Michael Adams' X-15-3 broke apart at an altitude of 43 miles (70 km). This crash was one of the reasons for the program's termination.

The X-15 even had a chance to become the first American spaceship. It was planned that it would use the SM-64 Navaho vertical launch cruise missile as its first stage. Unfortunately, of the 13 SM-64 Navaho launches, only three were partially successful, and NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of NASA) preferred Project Mercury, which led to the first manned US space launch on May 5, 1961. There was even a concept for a two-seat X-15, but after the flight of Freedom 7, the need for it disappeared.

The North American X-15, like other "Xs" (US experimental aircraft have the X index, but not all), served the cause of improving aviation and space technology well, and some of the developments from the X-15 era were used later in the Space Shuttle program. But that's another story altogether.