Raketen-Flugtechnik. Mit 92 Abbildungen.

Ann Arbor, J. W. Edwards, 1945. 8vo. X,+ 222 pp. Illustrated. Publ. green cloth. No dustwrapper. Alicke, The Moon in Science & Fiction 308: ”[Sänger] was indubitably the first among rocket aircraft engineers who did not grope and hope but attacked the problem systematically.” Ley, Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel (1959), p. 507 (first edition 1933). Lithoprint of the first German edition (München und Berlin, Verlag von R. Oldenbourg, 1933). The Austrian aerospace engineer Eugen Sänger (1905-1964) was inspired by Hermann Oberth’s classic book ”Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen” (1923) when he changed from studying conventional civil engineering to aeronautics. Rocket-powered flight eventually became the subject for his thesis, based on a number of comprehensive and systematic rocket-motor tests at the Technical University of Vienna. The thesis was however rejected as being too fanciful by the university, and instead published as this privately printed book in 1933. Before and during WW2, Sänger came to work for the Nazi government in Germany with the development of rocket-powered, sub-orbital bombers, taking with him the idea of using rocket-fuel to cool the rocket, a system he had first tried out during his experiments in Vienna and presented in this work. After the war he was employed by the French government and while in France he founded the Fédération Astronautique in 1949. Sänger returned to Germany in 1954, where he worked as a consultant for Junkers and developed theoretical innovations for interstellar spacecraft propulsion, among other things. His early concept for a rocket-powered glider/bomber would later bear fruit in the development of the Space Shuttle.