Absolutely no way could they do it with 1940s tech, and if they could they'd be much better advised to take it straight to orbit and forget all this skipping on the atmosphere stuff. They'll need to carry enough fuel to attain full orbit anyway, best to use it once instead of rationing it out in penny packets!
It in no way represents a simplification or a quick dirty approach to space travel. If our stunt pilot record hunters want to just say they went up 200 kilometers, best they hitch a ride on a V-2 and carry a parachute, just like the BIS proposal upthread.
Indeed. American hypersonics proponents looked at the idea (the skip-reentry one) in the '50s, I believe it was, and threw it away because it just didn't work compared to a strictly ballistic or all-lift trajectory (forgive me for being unspecific, I don't have my reference books on me now).
MattII said:
Well it doesn't need to work for years, only months or even weeks, and it doesn't have to work usefully, provided it's transmitting radio pulses it will be enough to convince people (and governments) that such things are possible. Also, a manned satellite will have even more valves, due to having to deal with life-support, and controls and the like.
Two things here:
1: Why would you launch a communication satellite that worked off a battery? For anything more complex than Spunik's beeping, it's going to die in
days, and if you want something that lasts longer, you're going to need a constant source of power. Ain't no RTGs or solar cells around back then. Any power source is going to be *big*; so big that putting some people up on it just isn't that big a deal.
2: Crewed satellites can replace valves. Big advantage here! It's the reason early thinkers figured on big stations way back when rather than little satellites. There is also, as I mentioned above, the fact that the smallest practical power system prior to the development of RTGs and solar cells was the mercury boiler, or similar solar thermodynamic units, which are naturally quite large and heavy.
It is also astonishing that you simply keep ignoring the entire idea behind the thread and appear to think it means what's the earliest *post-Sputnik* time someone can launch someone into "space". It is far easier to put someone on a ballistic trajectory than to launch
any orbital object (indeed, the Soviets were doing very nearly that, only with dogs and dummies instead of people, several years before they were even capable of launching a satellite), so if someone was simply interested in one-off prestige stunts it would make
far more sense to do a simple ballistic flight than try to launch a satellite. The reason this wasn't done IOTL is that none of the early flights *actually were* one-off prestige stunts; the spysat program, the IGY, showing off what your missiles could do (which is similar but not identical to a prestige stunt), all those interacted to make satellite launches get the funding. Doesn't have to be that way ITTL.