When WWII ended, American engineers examined a trove of Nazi concepts for rocket-powered weapons and airplanes. One of the most terrifying was Eugen Sänger's antipodal bomber, a manned supersonic plane designed to reach any city on Earth in one hour. Thank heavens it never worked.
Historian Amy Shira Teitel, who runs the fantastic Vintage Space blog over at Popular Science, brings us the story of Eugen Sänger, an Austrian rocket engineer who devised a concept for a rocket plane with a flat-bottomed fuselage. With the right propulsion—in this case, a rocket-powered slingshot on the runway—Sänger theorized that the plane would climb to the upper reaches of the sky, then skip across the lower levels of the atmosphere like a rock on a pond. He figured a pilot could reach any point on the globe within one hour, drop a bomb, and return to a predetermined landing site. Full Article
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