Background
The development of Dyna Soar can be traced back to Eugen Sänger's Silbervogel, a German bomber project of World War II. The concept was a rocket-powered bomber that could travel vast distances by gliding to its target after being boosted to high speed (>5.5 km/s) and high altitude (50–150 km) by A-4 or A-9 rocket engines.
Essentially, these rocket engines would place the vehicle onto an exoatmospheric intercontinental ballistic missile-like trajectory and then fall away. When the vehicle reentered the atmosphere, instead of fully reentering, bleeding off its speed and landing, the vehicle would use its wings and some of its speed to generate lift and bounce the vehicle back into space again. This would repeat until the speed was low enough that the pilot of the vehicle would need to pick a landing spot and glide the vehicle to a landing. This use of hypersonic atmospheric lift meant that the vehicle could greatly extend its range over a ballistic trajectory using the same engines.
Such boost-glide systems could potentially strike at targets anywhere in the world (so called "antipodal bombers") at hypersonic speeds, be very difficult to intercept, and the aircraft itself could be small and lightly armed, compared to a typical heavy bomber. In addition, a boost-glide aircraft may be recoverable, acting as a manned bomber, or as an unmanned non-recoverable missile.
Following World War II, many German scientists were taken to the United States by the Office of Strategic Services's "Operation Paperclip". Among them was Dr. Walter Dornberger, the former head of Germany's wartime rocket program, who had detailed knowledge of the Silbervogel project. Working for Bell, he attempted to create interest in a boost-glide system in the USAF, and elsewhere. This resulted in the USAF requesting a number of feasibility and design studies — carried out by Bell, Boeing, Convair, Douglas, Martin, North American, Republic, and Lockheed — for boost-glide vehicles during the early 1950s:
- Bomi (bomber missile);
- Hywards (HYpersonic Weapons Research and Development Supporting system);
- The Brass Bell reconnaissance vehicle; and
- Rocket Bomber "Robo".
Read more about this topic: Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar
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