Boeing’s X-20 called “Dyna-Soar” (Dynamic Soaring) or X-20 Dyna-Soar dates from the late 1950s, but the original concept dates back to Nazi Germanywith a dark story behind this mysterious US Air Force plane.
as it counts Slash GearIn the course of the war, Nazi engineers were bent on making (space) aircraft that could reach the continental United States and it was they who succeeded in creating the first fighter planes.
In the minds of the Nazi high command, the United States was the next obvious target after the conquest of Europe. Fortunately, that never happened, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying. Nazi scientists at the Peenemunde Research Center, where NASA engineer Wernher von Braun once worked, they were in the early stages of developing a space plane capable of dropping bombs from low orbit.
never saw the light of day
Boeing’s design in the 1960s followed the same concept and could have been easily assembled given its maximum payload of 10,500 pounds.
Verifiable details about the X-20 are murky at best, since it never got past the prototype stage, and never actually flew. But the project came so close to getting the green light that astronauts and test pilots were actively training to fly the craft using simulators.
Neil Armstrong himself worked on the creation of such simulators. According to Armstrong at the time, Dyna-Soar itself was a separate project developed by the United States Air Force and not by NASA.
After $410 million, the project was scrapped. According to Boeing, the X-20 really had no realistic combat use, and given the proliferation of nuclear-capable missiles and long-range strategic bombers, it would become obsolete very quickly even if it saw the light of day. at daytime. The project was officially closed on December 10, 1963, just under six years before Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, without the aid of a space plane.