wrote:

Actually... he was pitching that to the *United* *States* Air Force.
Exactly what role, if any, this had in wartime is at best uncertain. It
had no military equipment, nor room for any such. It was a go-fast
vehicel with a paylaod that consisted wholly of the pilot.



Walter Dornberger said it was for use as a reconnaissance aircraft in
his book "Peenemunde, Die Geschichte der V-Waffen" and apparently has a
drawing of it in that role as picture #21 in the book. If anyone would
know what it was supposed to be used for, it would be Dornberger.
On the transatlantic flights, guidance was to be aided by U-boats giving
the pilot position updates via radio beacons:
http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/a9a10.htm




He was also talking about flying a pilot over the
Atlantic in 30 minutes, which is something the manned A-9 couldn't do,
so he must have been referring to some sort on manned derivitive of the
A9/A10.



Von Braun talked about a *lot* of things psot war that appear to be at
best massive exagerations, designed to make himself look more appealing
to the US Army while at Fort Bliss.



A9/A10 was a very real project, as the surviving wartime documents from
WW II show; some of those go back to 1941, and the idea was originated
in 1940.




The biggest argument for a manned version of a A9/A10 is accuracy...



Wrong. There is no evidence whatsoever for a manned A9/A10 ICBM. There
was thought about using U-boats near the US coast for terminal
guidance.



See the above article from Encyclopedia Astronautica. Developing a
automated guidance system to steer the rocket via signals from U boats
would've probable weighed more than a pilot would. In the book " The
Birth Of The Missile" one the reproduced wartime notes on its targets
are the trajectories from Cape da Roca, Portugal and Ouessant, France to
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. - which is a tad inland for terminal U-boat
guidance.





the A9 is going to come down just about anywhere, which is strategically
worthless.



Which is the primary reason why the program was terminated.



With a piloted one, you could hit an important target in a propaganda
strike. If the thing could be steered into major well known buildings it
could have a devastating morale effect, as we well know after 9/11.
Having 2,000 pound explosive charges driven into The Empire State
Building, The Statue Of Liberty, The Capital Building, The White House,
The New York Stock Exchange, The Pentagon, and Katz's Delicatessen*
inside of a week is going to be upsetting to a lot of Americans, who
unlike the British, weren't used to being attacked in their own country.


Yet the project
stays active at a low level during the whole of WW II ...



Yes, the guys who initially worked on kept noodling with it. That was
about it. It's like a couple VentureStar engineers who keep talking
about it over lunch.

and suddenly gets


pushed forward at the very end, which means the high command thinks
there's some virtue in it.



In the last days the high command was insanely desperate.




As far as the jettisonable cover over the ramjet inlet, I've never seen
any info on this, but it's a good idea to decrease drag while doing
rocket flight in the stand-alone A-9 reconnaissance version, or protect
the ramjet from reentry heating in the A9/A10 version, so I wouldn't be
at all surprised if it was incorporated in the final design.



Except none of those "designs" existed until the 1990's, it appears.



Well, the manned one goes back to October 1947 at least, as that's when
the Popular Science magazine cited in the Modern Mechanixs article is
from. And it's based on information in "German Developments in the Field
of Guided Missiles" which was a report by Col. Donald L. Putt, Army Air
Forces Intelligence. (Oh Rusty, do you think you could find a PDF of this?).
I think they have that middle initial wrong; it should be Col. Donald L.
Putt, and this guy's future is all ahead of him at this time in history;
he's going to end up a Major General, and be heavily involved in our
early missile programs after the war, and in advanced aircraft work.
Being that Putt was one of the major people involved in digging through
the German aeronautical data and research after WW II and in debriefing
the German scientists for what data they had on advanced rocket and
aircraft designs. So if he says they were working on a manned
transatlantic missile, I'll take him at his word.
He's surprisingly difficult to find detailed information of, being that
he seems to be involved in so many programs after the war, including
such things as the U-2, Hydrogen-fueled propulsion, and the Atlas missile.
Even his official Air Force biography is only up to date till March of
1957: http://www.af.mil/bios/bio.asp?bioID=6829
He was rumored to be a member of Majestic 12 BTW, for what that's worth.
:-)

* New York's oldest Jewish deli, and therefore no doubt a major Nazi
target: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katz's_Deli
Remember: "Send a salami to your boy in the army!":
http://www.katzdeli.com/shopping/index.php?cat=salami
I think Saddam Hussein needs to be inundated with Katz Salamis. :-D

Pat