Silverbird bomber

Could a POD have made the WW2 silverbird bomber design a reality (assume the heat shield flaw was fixed before actual testing)?
 
Unless Germany won total victory in WW2, no. At least not soon after the war. The construction of such machine recquired a huge amount of technical, industrial, and technological force.

Maybe the Soviets got the plans from German scientists at the end of WW2 and build it to beat the Americans in the space race?
 
Silverbird would've certainly been a doable project....in the late '60s/early '70s. For WWII, it's pure ASB (especially for Nazi Germany).

I'd imagine the US would be more interested in such a project rather than the Soviets, who had a vested interest in developing rocket and missile projects, vice the early American emphasis on aircraft. However, they'd both have access to the resources and capabilities to make Silverbird work.
 
Something like the silverbird (both manned and unmanned versions) would probably require no more materiel resources than what was required to develop intercontinental ballistic missles and traditional vertically launched rockets. One could create a PoD in the late 1930s and early 1940's in which the brains behind the V-2 rocket program died or lost interest, leading Sanger pretty much alone in Nazi Germany to get vengeance-weapon funding. The Silvervogel idea is much more complex than the V-2, however, so it is virtually impossible that Germany could have developed operational prototypes, but this research might affect the direction of later US and Soviet strategic weapon and space research toward reusable space planes far earlier.
 
To be fair, nothing in the OP says it has to be made during WW2, nor did it have to be a success, just that it'd have to be made. So all you have to do to come up with a PoD is find a reason for the US or the USSR to develop it.
 
Silverbird would've certainly been a doable project....in the late '60s/early '70s. For WWII, it's pure ASB (especially for Nazi Germany).

I'd imagine the US would be more interested in such a project rather than the Soviets, who had a vested interest in developing rocket and missile projects, vice the early American emphasis on aircraft. However, they'd both have access to the resources and capabilities to make Silverbird work.

Quite the opposite, Stalin attempted to have Eugen Sanger won over after the war so he could make a Soviet space plane.
 
I'm sure he did; however, there is still the fact that the standing Soviet (and now Russian) military doctrine has always had a love affair with rocketry at both the tactical and strategic levels (source).

Does this mean that Silverbird would never be built and/or used by the Soviets? Of course not, they understood the value of high-speed combat aircraft (evidence), but in the greater scheme of things I would suspect missile projects would tend to get greater emphasis before work would begin on an aviation project of this nature. Not that it wouldn't/couldn't happen, merely that something like Silverbird could be seen as less relevant to their strategic picture.
 
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