 On April 28th, 1945, a small cohort of American scientists arrived in London. They were there to study the German Army's weapons, namely its supersonic missiles and aircraft. And what they found was that the German Army actually had not one, but two systems designed to bomb American cities from Western European launch sites. One was an offshoot of the V2 developed by Werner von Braun, the A9 and A10 missiles. The other was from an engineer named Eugen Sanger. And it was slightly more menacing because this was a manned precision bomber that could destroy any city within an hour of launching. In the 1930s, Sanger developed a futuristic transportation system for both men and cargo. It was a winged vehicle that could travel to any point on the planet within an hour. Sanger's design was also manned. It was designed to be flown by a pilot and land safely on a runway at the end of every flight. Ahead of its time in the 1930s, Sanger couldn't interest his native Austrian army in the design, but the German army was interested in a weaponized version of this manned transportation system. The German Air Force funded his research with varying levels of commitment throughout the Second World War. But the design never came to fruition. The furthest it got to development was a 1944 detailed report Sanger wrote to try to get the product off the ground in post-World War II Europe. The core of Sanger's system was an airplane inspired design, longer than its wingspan was wide with an ogival fuselage, cylindrical in shape but tapered to a point at the nose. The vehicle's bottom, however, was flat. The bomber was designed to launch from a catapult powered by an array of V2 rockets. By the time it reached the end of the track, the bomber would be traveling fast enough to take off. Once clear of the catapult, the pilot would ignite the vehicle's own rockets, shooting up into the stratosphere. Once up in the stratosphere, the vehicle's aerodynamics, and specifically its flat bottom, became the pilot's chief ally in controlled flight. The vehicle's flat bottom meant that it could skip off the thicker layers of the atmosphere. Keeping the vehicle at the right orientation, the pilot could maneuver it so that it skipped off the atmosphere as it lost altitude. Instead of simply falling from its apex after launch, this vehicle would develop an oscillating gliding path that would take it far further than it would normally be able to fly. Following this trajectory, the pilot could drop a bomb at a precalculated launch point, and after multiple passes, detonate an entire major city. Once his warhead had been released, the pilot could direct the glider to a pre-selected landing site. He'd land on a runway with nose gear and retractable landing skids designed to increase friction upon touchdown. Though Sanger's bomber may never have flown, it did have one short-lived American spin-off, the joint U.S. Air Force NASA dinosaur. The program was cancelled in 1962 before it ever left the ground. Questions or comments? Leave them below. And for weekly vintage space updates, don't forget to subscribe.