Guest
Get FOR FREE Morning Brew here: /escapevelocity New York wakes to a second sunrise - but this one burns hotter than the surface of the sun - it sets fire to the grass, boils the river and even melts steel beams. And worse of all, there is no defense to this nazi mega project. You might have heard of this project before, but believe me when you see this video will reliase that hiter was far more insane than you ever imagined. With solar factories, farms and dormentaries onboard, it was more ambitious than any space station today, and would have truely propelled the humanity to the stars. Or totally wiped the united states and its allies from the earth. Join me today for the incredible Nazi fever dream, the sun gun! In 1923, a german rocket scientist came up with an ambitious idea. What if nighttime… didn’t have to happen? What if crops around the world could grow 24, what if steam engines could operate without fuel - what if… enemy cities could be vapourised. Yes thats right - while the origin of this concept was clouded in peace, but it had a sinister objective - to construct an orbital weapons platofrm capable of eliinating armies, boiling oceans and igniting huge forest fires. It would be called the Heliobeam or its far more catcher name - the Sun gun! This thing was huge. Measuring at least over a kilometer big, or miles, this giant concave mirror would reflect the suns rays to a sharp point - how sharp depending on the angle of the mirror. And it was far more than just a mirror as well. It would have been constructed in stages by rockets over a decade - very optimistic timeline - with crews living in space as they put the giant mirror together. The space station would have required greenhouses to grow food - living quarters, warehouses - all in zero gravity - something that we have to admit was a little out of reach conceptually with scientist at the time. But I’m getting ahead of myself, lets get back to the madman behind the idea. Like all crazy nazi ideas, there was a equally crazy scientist behind it - Hermann Oberth Hermann was one the founding fathers of rocketry in the world, launching his first test rocket at 14 and joining the ranks of the nazi space and rocket programs with the likes of V2 inventor, Wernher von Braun. You have to imagine that while he was working on his test rockets as a boy, he would notice how the sunlight would reflect off the surface of his shiny materials, and illuminate the shadows. He also apparently noticed how the shiny material would greatly annoy his elders, remarking in one interview ““My space mirror is like the hand mirrors that schoolboys use to flash circles of sunlight on the ceiling of their classroom. A sudden beam flashed on the teacher’s face may bring unpleasant reactions.” The idea was floated around academic circles as a way to reflect light to help generate power at night, act as a weather tower and radio relay site, but as rocket technology in the 1920s and 30s was so limited, and that the economy was in tatters in germany - it never took off, and is where our story ends… Or it would have, if infaliable Hitler didn’t see the idea and pushed it forward In 1941, Hiter commissioned a study into the sun gun idea, with a staggering budget of three million Reichsmarks - which todays US dollars is around 150 million - not bad for a initial proposal! They fleshed out the proposal. The space station would sit at around 8,000 kilometers, or 5,100 miles above Earth. The scientists calculated that a huge reflector, made of metallic sodium and with an area of 3.5 square miles, would be large enough to do the job. It would be contructued of prefab sections that owuld allow easy construction in orbit. Onboard, the crew would use magnetic shoes to move around in the zero or light rotating gravity, and they would replenish their food and oxygen with vast greenhouses filled with pumpkin plants - chosen for their hungry applitite for CO2. This would all be powered by the sun of course! No not solar panels, they were not invented yet, but actually steam driven dynamos that would capture the suns heat. Of course. The mirror would be rotated into position using rocket thrusters, and when not in use, rotated to face away from the earth. So why was it never built?
