Eugen Sänger
| Eugen Sänger | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
22 September 1905 Preßnitz, Bohemia |
| Died | 10 February 1964 (aged 58) Berlin |
| Nationality | Bohemian, Austrian |
| Engineering career | |
| Significant advance | lifting body and ramjet |
Eugen Sänger (22 September 1905 – 10 February 1964) was an Austrian aerospace engineer best known for his contributions to lifting body and ramjet technology.
Sänger was born in the former mining town of Preßnitz (Přísečnice), near Chomutov in Bohemia, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied civil engineering at the Technical Universities of Graz and Vienna. As a student, he came in contact with Hermann Oberth's book Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen ("By Rocket into Planetary Space"), which inspired him to change from studying civil engineering to aeronautics. He also joined Germany's amateur rocket movement, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (VfR – "Society for Space Travel") which was centered on Oberth.
In 1932 Sänger became a member of the SS and was also a member of the NSDAP.
Sänger made rocket-powered flight the subject of his thesis, but it was rejected by the university as too fanciful. He was allowed to graduate when he submitted a far more mundane paper on the statics of wing trusses. Sänger would later publish his rejected thesis under the title Raketenflugtechnik ("Rocket Flight Engineering") in 1933. In 1935 and 1936, he published articles on rocket-powered flight for the Austrian journal Flug ("Flight") These attracted the attention of the Reichsluftfahrtministerium (RLM, or "Reich Aviation Ministry") which saw Sänger's ideas as a potential way to accomplish the goal of building a bomber that could strike the United States from Germany (the Amerika Bomber project). The RLM gave him a research institute near Braunschweig and also built a liquid oxygen plant and a test stand for a 100 tonne thrust engine. At the time, Sänger's hiring was opposed by Wernher von Braun, who felt that his own work was being duplicated and may have seen the Austrian and his work as a threat to his own dominance of the field.
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