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A-10 Boost-Glide Vehicle

The Germans began development of a missile arsenal during the 1930s at Kummersdorf and Peenemünde, with increased emphasis during World War II. These experiments resulted in the Vergeltsungswaffe Ein and Zwei (Revenge Weapons One and Two), or V-1 and V-2. While the V-1 was an early unmanned aircraft system, the V-2 was a 46-foot-long rocket that used alcohol and liquid oxygen as propellants. It reached an altitude of 50 to 60 miles, had a maximum range of 200 miles, and carried a one-ton warhead. The system’s accuracy was 2.5 miles.

No later than 1936 the Army rocket group planned an A-4 successor with a 100-metric-ton-(220,000-lb)-thrust liquid-oxygen/alcohol engine, a warhead of 4 tons (8,800 lb) and a range of more than 500 km (300 mi). Peenemünde facilities built from 1936 to 1939 were designed to accommodate it. Priority problems in 1939–40 pushed the concept into the background, but the A-10 had a second life as the projected booster for the A-9. In 1941 planned thrust was increased to 180 tons (400,000 lb) in order to reach the United States from Western Europe. The A-9/A-10 was never more than a drawing-board concept and was shelved in 1942.

The A-9 was the latest design of A-4 with wings. It was computed that the use of wings would increase the range of A-4 to about 400 miles. The A-10 was a launching rocket to be used with A-9 to secure ranges of 3000 miles. The total weight of A-10 was 190,000 lb of which about 140,000 lb was fuel. Its thrust was 440,000 lb for 50 sec. It was nearly 12 ft in diameter and 25 ft long. The 29,000-lb A-9 was to be accelerated to a speed of 3600 ft/sec by the use of the 190,000-lb A-10 as launching rocket. The rocket motor of A-9 would then be turned on and increase the speed to 8600 ft/sec. The explosive load would be about 1% of the starting weight.

Some consideration was also given to carrying a pilot in the A-9 rocket. The A-10 was only a project on which some drawings and computations had been made. The war ended before the results of research into longer-range (transatlantic) two-stage rockets, called the A-9 and A-10, could be used. These weapons might have been operational by 1948.

The possibilities of long-range strategic bombing were fully understood in Germany. There is no question but that the diversion of the efforts of the Peenemiinde scientists in 1943 to the development of an antiaircraft guided rocket delayed the introduction of the winged V-2 rocket (A-9) and its successor, the transoceanic rocket (A-9 plus A-10).

Drawings and computations had been completed for the A-10, a rocket weighing 85 T with a thrust of 200 T to be used as a launching rocket for the A-9, accelerating it to a speed of 3,600 ft/sec. The motor of the A-9 would accelerate it further to a speed of 8,600 ft/sec, giving it a range of about 3,000 miles. Some consideration was given to the design of one version of the A-9 carrying a pilot.

In 1937 there was not even a vague sketch of the “coming big rocket,” or A-10. Called simply the “100-ton device” before 1940, this larger missile was to have a range of 800 kilometers (500 miles) and would quadruple the A-4’s 1-ton warhead and 25-ton engine thrust. As was the case in the planning of the development shops and test stands of Peenemünde-East, Dornberger wanted the rocket factory sized to accommodate the A-10, since the A-4 was viewed only as an interim weapon. All the objections of von Braun and Rudolph were to no avail.

Planning began in January 1939, to construct by early 1943 something that had never existed before: a ballistic missile factory. The four-year time scale ordered by von Brauchitsch, no doubt on the advice of Becker and Dornberger, was the expected peacetime development period of either the A-4 or the A-10. In February 1939, however, the Peenemünde engineers gave a more realistic estimate of at least six years before the design of the bigger missile would be finished. The Reich was to receive five hundred A-10s or 1,500 A-4s a year, numbers that look, in comparison to later wartime production, unimpressive. As it turned out, about 6,000 A-4s would be built in much more difficult conditions over fifteen months at the end of the war.

By 1940 the work of the development engineers at Peenemünde centered on the A-4 and related activities, such as A-5 launches and the design of the long-range winged A-4 (soon dubbed the A-9). The “100-ton device” (A-10) remained on the books too, but it was a mere paper concept as long as the smaller missile was unfinished.

On 31 July 1941, Dornberger drafted a memorandum for presentation to Hitler. Dornberger discussed joint projects with the Luftwaffe, a winged A-4 (the A-9) for longer ranges, and a two-stage missile to hit the United States. A possible design for an “America rocket” (in modern terminology, an intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM) had emerged during the preceding year in the studies of the center’s Projects Office. Headed by Ludwig Roth, that office had investigated placing the A-9 atop the 100-metric-ton-thrust A-10. To reach America, it would be necessary to increase the A-10’s thrust almost twofold to 180 tons (about 400,000 lbs of thrust), and even then the A-9 would be only able to hit East Coast cities after a hypersonic glide.

The concept was far beyond Peenemünde’s technological grasp. The guidance requirements were too exacting, the aerodynamics were unknown, and materials did not yet exist to allow the upper stage to survice reentry into the atmosphere. But the idea appealed to the vivid imaginations of von Braun and his engineers.

The summer and fall of 1941 was the apogee of planning at Peenemünde for the A-9/A-10 ICBM and, on the margins, for even more exotic possibilities like a manned A-9. The post-war USAF Scientific Advisory Group agreed that the German results of wind-tunnel tests, ballistic computation, and experience with the V-2 justify the conclusion that a transoceanic rocket can be developed. On 24 March 1946 (typically cited as “April 1946”), NAA received a letter contract from the AAF to develop a supersonic guided missile with a range of 175 to 500 miles, a weapon assigned the designation MX (missile experiment) 770 and the name Navaho. The mid-range weapon was “fundamentally the same” as the last, winged version of the V-2 (alternately known as the A-4b and the A-9), an unfinished project of the scientists and engineers at Peenemünde.

On April 13, 1945, two days after the liberation of Nordhausen, elements of the 1st Infantry Division discovered the Hermann Göring Aeronautical Research Center at Völkenrode with its highly advanced aeronautics facilities. The AAF prepared Operation LUSTY (an acronym for “Luftwaffe Secret Technology”) to exploit the liberation of Völkenrode. For the scientific team, the aerodynamic facilities at Völkenrode were a treasure trove of advanced technology, including plans and models not only of the V-2 (originally named the A-4) but also of the A-9 and A-10 missiles, prototype ICBMs.

Despite the ballistic rockets developed by the military during World War II, many leading aerospace figures continued to envision winged space vehicles. In 1951, for example, Wernher von Braun wrote of winged rockets. The next year, Collier’s magazine published a well-known series of articles by von Braun that proposed a space station tended to by a three-stage rocket, the third stage being a winged glider for crew reentry.