Breaking the Chains of Gravity

by Amy Shira Teitel

  At the heart of his system was a vehicle around ninety feet long with a wingspan measuring close to fifty feet. Roughly cylindrical, the vehicle tapered to a point at the front end and featured small wings and a flat underside, which was the crux of his design. Sänger theorized that if the vehicle could reach a high enough speed and altitude, it could be made to bounce off the atmosphere as it descended from its peak height, much like a stone skips across a calm pond. By harnessing the energy and gliding along an oscillating flight path, he thought, the vehicle could cover a significant distance before making an unpowered landing on a runway, landing like a traditional airplane.

  Sänger needed a rocket to get his vehicle up to high enough speeds and altitudes to begin the gliding descent. The launch system he imagined had the glider mounted on a rocket-powered sled. The sled would travel along an inclined monorail track for a horizontal rather than vertical launch, making for an easier flight for passengers and ensuring a simple ballistic flight path. Once airborne, the vehicle’s own rocket engine would fire to get it up to altitude, burning every bit of available fuel along the way. The fuel expended, momentum would carry the glider higher until gravity took over and began the vehicle’s descent. It would bounce and glide until reaching the lower atmosphere. At that point, it could fly like a traditional glider all the way to the runway. But this was only the first version. With enough rocket propulsion, Sänger knew, that same glider could fly fast enough to leave the Earth’s atmosphere altogether and go into orbit.

  Sänger was certain that the first iteration of his vehicle could be built and flown with existing technology. All that was missing was the necessary propulsion system, the constant pressure combustion chambers and tanks, to propel the vehicle from its starting point on the sled then boost it into the upper atmosphere. That was something Sänger couldn’t develop without laboratory space and funding. And so, like von Braun had done while at the Raketenflugplatz, Sänger turned to the military for sponsorship.

  Securing military funding for his vehicle meant Sänger had to pitch his aerospace transportation system as a weapon. So he added bombs to the vehicle, turning it into a manned long-range bomber, and because his glider could theoretically reach any point on the planet within an hour, he called this weaponized version the antipodal bomber.

  He envisioned two basic mission types for his antipodal bomber. The first was a point attack, a precision technique that would have the pilot release his bomb from a moderate altitude while flying at a moderate speed. Timed right, he could destroy a bridge, a building, or a tunnel entrance with a single device. The second method was an area bombing attack, which traded precision for might—damaging a larger swath of land, such as a city. This type of attack had the pilot drop his bomb from altitudes as high as a hundred miles while flying at much faster speeds. In both cases, the pilot could continue his gliding flight to a safe landing on a runway, burning any remaining fuel to extend his flight as needed. In the rare event that a target site was too far from a safe landing site, the pilot could ditch the glider, parachuting to safety himself while letting the glider crash.

  After a brief stint with the Austrian Nazi Party and its Schutzstaffel—the “Protective Echelon” known as the SS—in 1933, Sänger took his antipodal bomber idea to his native country’s army. But the Austrian military wasn’t interested; the Austrian National Defense Ministry said it couldn’t seriously consider the skip-glide system. Sänger designed it with a liquid oxygen and hydrocarbon combustion system, a poorly understood chemical reaction with a high risk of explosions. The Austrian Army thought it unlikely that such a volatile combination would ever become a practical means of propulsion. Undaunted, Sänger continued exploring liquid rocket propulsion on his own while also pursuing his job as an engineer for a Viennese construction company. In 1934, he took his antipodal bomber to the German Army, but again it failed to secure sponsorship. Because Sänger wasn’t German-born, a requested security check into his background submitted to the Sturmabteilung, the “Assault Division,” or SA, went unanswered. It didn’t help that his work was hardly more advanced than the army’s own. Rocket expert von Braun advised the German Air Ministry not to hire Sänger. The army ultimately passed on Sänger’s potentially duplicative proposal but advised him to take the antipodal bomber to the Luftwaffe.

  The Luftwaffe had no problem with Sänger’s Austrian background or with any similarities his technology bore to von Braun’s. The engineer was recruited to become a member of the Research Division of the Technical Office of the Göring Institute, joining the aeronautical research laboratory it was planning to build near Braunschweig in north-central Germany. The appointment also granted Sänger funds to establish a separate rocket research facility some distance away at Trauen, which was given the cover name of Aircraft Test Center to hide its existence as much from the army as from the public. The lab at Trauen was also a reaction to the new site at Peenemünde that promised to give von Braun a hefty increase in space and resources to bring his bigger A-series rockets to life. Hermann Göring, minister of aviation and commander of the Luftwaffe, wasn’t about to be outdone by Becker, Dornberger, and the army group. He sunk as much as eight million reichsmarks into Sänger’s winged bomber project.

  By this point, Dornberger’s group at Kummersdorf West had several years’ lead over Sänger, and the Army’s A-3 was far closer to being flight ready than any portion of the antipodal bombing system. The A-3 had some significant advances over its predecessors, notably the addition of an active three-axis gyroscope assembly for control in place of the earlier single gyroscope. The new system meant the rocket could launch without a support structure or guiding rails, making it the first to begin its flights from a freestanding position. The A-3 also featured a liquid nitrogen pressurization system equipped with a heater built into its liquid oxygen tank. As the liquid nitrogen was heated, it boiled off, forcing propellants into the combustion chamber for a more efficient and powerful burn. The A-3 was also the first rocket designed to reach supersonic velocity, flying faster than the speed of sound during its powered ascent while carrying a heavier payload to its target. These changes made the A-3 the team’s largest rocket. Gone were the days of transporting a rocket on top of a car. This new rocket could only be transported to the launchpad by rails.

  By the spring of 1937, simple but functional residential quarters were built on the southern portion of the site at Peenemünde, allowing the first wave of staff to relocate to the island facility. Workstations and test stands were meanwhile under construction on the island’s northern edge, closer to the Baltic. Dornberger and von Braun were among the first to arrive, and to the delight of the men who were slowly taking up residency, the construction crews had left a large portion of the local vegetation intact. It wasn’t a stylistic decision. Rather, the trees offered natural camouflage for the materials, buildings, and the rail lines that would soon be transporting rockets to their launchpads. The new facilities also gave the rocket team space to grow. Von Braun, newly promoted to technical director of the group at the time of his move to Peenemünde, brought friends and former VfR colleagues, including Walter Riedel, Arthur Rudolph, and Klaus Riedel, to fill out his team.

  Though von Braun’s promotion gave him a greater responsibility over the rocket program, it also came with the caveat that he join the Nazi Party. From his beginnings with the VfR to his position working for the army at Kummersdorf West, he had always been a civilian. Now, if he wanted to retain his position as a leader of German rocketry, he would have to pledge his allegiance to the Reich. Von Braun did have the option of not joining the Nazis and forsaking the half decade he had spent developing the Aggregate series, but it was not an appealing alternative. He joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1937.

  With the facilities at Peenemünde still under construction, work on the A-3 continued at Kummersdorf West, and the model grew into an absolute monster. Standing 21.3 feet tall and measuring 2.3 feet around at the widest point, the rocket’s long body tapered
to a point at the nose, while the base featured small stabilizing fins. Fueled and ready for launch, the A-3 weighed 1,650 pounds, dwarfing the rockets that had come before it. Far too big to launch near populated areas, the Kummersdorf group set up a temporary test stand for the rockets on the sandy island of Greifswalder Oie, just off the northern tip of Peenemünde. They poured concrete, dredged a harbor, and lay rails to transport the rockets. By the beginning of December, they were ready to launch their newest creation.

  With a boatload of dignitaries watching from a floating vantage point on the Baltic, the first A-3’s launch was problematic from the start. The rocket had been painted with water-soluble green dye that would act as a marker when it landed, but as condensation from the chilled liquid oxygen built up on the rocket’s body while the tanks were filled, the paint ran down the length of the fuselage until it reached the electrical cables connected at its base. The mix of condensation and paint shorted the cables, delaying the launch. The electrical issue was eventually resolved, and the rocket took flight over the Baltic. His eyes trained on the rocket, Dornberger watched in shock as the A-3 turned the wrong way around its longitudinal axis running from nose to engine and started flying directly into the wind. It started tumbling as the engine burned through all its fuel, and the instant the parachute deployed it was caught in the wind and forced right into the rocket’s hot residual exhaust and started to burn. Without a parachute, the rocket had no recovery system. Dornberger watched, helpless, as the rocket tumbled into the Baltic. Fog rolled over Greifswalder Oie, putting a hold on further launches and giving Dornberger’s team time to figure out what had gone wrong.

  Days later, von Braun and Dornberger determined that the parachute was the most immediate cause of the tumbling motion. It was also the easiest problem to solve—the parachute could simply be removed, and the rocket would be fine to splash down into the Baltic on its own. They readied another A-3 for launch and, when the fog finally cleared from Greifswalder Oie, they moved it out to the sandy island for launch. This second flight saw the rocket rise beautifully from the launchpad before tipping over and tumbling into the Baltic. The next launch saw the same troubled flight path repeated. Von Braun and Dornberger were forced to concede that for all its advances and sophistication, the A-3 was a dud. They figured the guidance system was the root cause of its problems, one that merited another series of test rockets. Because the A-4 was already earmarked as the first production rocket for the army, they skipped to the A-5 as the next proof of concept test rocket. They had to figure out the guidance problem if the A-4 was going to reach its target every time.

  Von Braun and his team of rocketeers set to work solving the A-3’s guidance problem while Dornberger was forced to contend with a larger, bureaucratic issue. Unforeseen development costs had pushed the Luftwaffe out of Peenemünde, leaving the site an army-only facility that couldn’t afford to foot the bill alone. What Dornberger needed now more than a rocket was a patron rich and powerful enough to sponsor his team’s continued work. But there were far larger problems brewing on a national scale that diverted attention from the esoteric rocket team’s problems. Hitler’s Nazi Party had started flexing its muscles and making its true might known throughout Europe. In March of 1938, the independent Austrian government fell and the German Army moved in swiftly to take its place. On the night of November 7, a seventeen-year-old Jewish teenager killed a counselor at the German Embassy in Paris. This became the rationale behind an organized wave of pogroms aimed at Jews throughout Germany and German-occupied lands two days later. Gangs of Nazis smashed Jewish-owned shop windows. The Night of Broken Glass, Kristallnacht, ended the following morning with some thirty thousand Jews rounded up and carted out to the first concentration camps.

  Against this increasingly hostile political backdrop, Dornberger found a solution to his sponsorship problem and von Braun got a strange twenty-seventh birthday present. On March 23, 1939, Adolf Hitler arrived at Kummersdorf West. The Führer had been Germany’s leader for six years, Dornberger had been in charge of the country’s rocket program for nine years, and finally the two men met to discuss rocketry’s role in Germany’s future. Dornberger, along with von Braun, gave Hitler and his small entourage a tour of Kummersdorf West, showing off their test stands and pieces of their hardware. They used a cutaway model of the A-3 to show Hitler what sophisticated instrumentation they had developed, and illustrated the power of their current A-5 with a rocket stripped down to show all its inner workings. They performed a static fire test of an engine to show its power in action. But throughout the day, the Führer was uncharacteristically silent. Typically fascinated by armaments and eager to ask probing questions about specific pieces of technology, Hitler seemed disinterested in the rockets he was being shown. His eyes, thought Dornberger, seemed unfocused, as though his mind was miles away. Even the roaring rocket engine test failed to garner any reaction from the Führer. Not until the men all sat down to lunch together at the end of the tour did Hitler ask any questions. Over a vegetarian meal, the Führer asked how soon the A-4 would be ready and how far it would be able to travel.

  An outwardly unimpressed Hitler left a disappointed von Braun and Dornberger in his wake as he departed Kummersdorf West. Without additional money, their rockets wouldn’t come to life, and without interest from the Führer, they couldn’t expect any increase in funding. The pair couldn’t help but wonder if they had demonstrated a small rocket launch whether the day might have ended differently, whether seeing a launch would have convinced Hitler the rockets were worth funding. The cutaways and static tests had perhaps done a poor job of illustrating just what kind of power the army’s rockets were capable of to someone familiar with the weaponry men wielded in trenches during the First World War. The potential of rocketry remained untapped, and the program was left with no priority status in a country that seemed increasingly on the verge of another war.

  The threat of war became real on September 1, 1939, when Germany declared war on Poland. The aggression, ostensibly due to a hostile attack from Poland, was in fact an attack faked by the Nazi government. A month after their country went to war, Dornberger and von Braun had an A-5 ready to launch. Like the A-3, the A-5 stood 21.3 feet tall and measured 2.6 feet in diameter. Tapered to a point at the nose, it housed a thirty-three-hundred-pound thrust engine in its thick base. All told, this rocket was slightly heavier than its predecessor, weighing in at two thousand pounds, but it addressed the problems that had dogged the A-3. On its first launch, the A-5 rose off its launchpad and followed a perfectly straight trajectory before disappearing into the clouds. At the moment the onboard fuel was used up, von Braun released the parachutes by radio command and watched, alongside Dornberger, as the rocket reappeared from the clouds, suspended from its parachute perfectly on time. It fell softly into the Baltic where it bobbed patiently in the water. It was in perfect condition. Had it not been completely waterlogged, it could have been launched again.

  In spite of the A-5’s success, Hitler remained unmoved. These missiles were still in a relatively early stage of development, and the Führer only wanted weapons that could be used immediately. He wasn’t interested in weapons that would be available months or years down the line. In February 1940, Hitler ordered all weapons development programs that weren’t ready for combat struck from the priority list. This meant the rocket program at Peenemünde would continue limping along with meager funding.

  Hitler might have remained cold, but there were other factions within the Nazi regime that were quite interested in the rockets coming out of Peenemünde—namely the SS, the muscle behind the Nazi regime that functioned on the strength of volunteers who believed in the Nazi cause. Dornberger knew the SS was interested in somehow getting a foothold in the rocket team’s work, but it turned out it was also interested in recruiting Wernher von Braun to join its ranks. On May 1, 1940, SS Colonel Müller arrived in von Braun’s office. He was there on behalf of Heinrich Himmler, the strict schoolmarmish head of the SS who wa
s known for his penchant for punishment. Müller had orders for von Braun to join the SS, he told the engineer. Von Braun rebuffed the request, explaining that he was too busy with his rocket work. Müller countered this thinly veiled refusal with the assurance that any time commitments to the SS would be minimal, and von Braun could join right away as an Untersturmführer, a lieutenant. Von Braun again held Müller at bay, this time asking for a few days to consider the invitation, a request the SS representative honored.

  Fully aware of the potential political implications if he became involved with the SS, von Braun immediately took the matter to Dornberger, who was still his military superior. Dornberger’s opinion confirmed von Braun’s feelings; he told his younger colleague that joining the SS was the only way he could continue working on the A-4 program with the army. If he agreed, the SS, and particularly Himmler, would have its coveted direct link to the program at Peenemünde. The alternative was to forfeit his work and likely be sent to perish in a work camp. Again, a desire to continue his rocket work weighed heavy, and von Braun wrote to Müller with his decision. Within two weeks he received a reply saying his application to join the SS had been approved by Himmler.

  His new affiliation didn’t have an immediate impact on von Braun or his work at Peenemünde, which continued to want for financial support. Business continued as usual. Von Braun visited Sänger’s laboratory at Trauen and returned the favor by bringing the Austrian engineer to visit the site on the Baltic. The two rocket scientists crossed paths again and shared research at a hypersonics conference at Peenemünde in October 1940, continuing their independent programs. For von Braun, his life remained devoted to getting the A-4 off the ground while the war intensified around him.

  1940 saw the Nazis conquer Poland before attacking Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark, and occupying a large portion of France. Hermann Göring had the Luftwaffe bomb England, the country Hitler needed to conquer if he was going to control all of Europe. In the summer of 1941, Hitler pushed the German front into Russia, advancing over five hundred thousand square miles of land. It seemed like only a matter of time before the war would spread to the United States.