A Rocket Drive For Long Range Bombers.

Translated by M. Hamermesh of the Radio Research Laboratory from Sänger and Bredt’s Über einen Raketenantrieb für Fernbomber (Ainring, August 1944; Deutsche Luftfahrtforschung UM 3538), and reproduced in typescript by Robert Cornog, 10609 Flaxton Street, Culver City, with a typed publisher’s note by Cornog, dated Santa Barbara, 16 November 1952. The note says the report condenses more than a decade of the authors’ work, contains only about a third of their material with all the mathematical derivations omitted, and that the U.S. Navy’s (BUAER) translation had been given to libraries and institutions but this was the first time the report was available for public sale. It describes Sänger, then living in Paris and employed by the Arsenal de l’Aéronautique, as president of the International Astronautical Federation; the minutes of the First International Astronautical Congress, Paris 1950, where he was elected, are in the collection.

The authors’ foreword says the investigations began as joint work in 1937–41 and were meant, with the material of report UM-3509, to be a second volume of Sänger’s Rocket Flight Technique; wartime circumstances postponed publication. The seven sections cover fundamentals; the aircraft (motor, exhaust speed, air-frame, glide number); launching by catapult and climb; supersonic and subsonic gliding flight and landing; projection of bombs; the types of attack, from point attack with reversal of path to area attack with circumnavigation; and the development line of the rocket bomber, from combustion chamber and fuels to wind-tunnel, take-off, flight and bomb-release tests. It includes diagrams of the engine and photographs of experimental motors and test firings. Sänger’s Raketenflugtechnik (1933) and The Technology of Rocket Flight are in Catalog A.