Rocketing Into the Future: The History and Technology of Rocket Planes

Abstract

As a Dutch kid growing up in the early 1980s I devoured the 'Euro 5' science fiction series by Bert Benson. They were typical boy's adventures: in each book a secret team of European policemen had some 200 pages to track down a menagerie of rampaging robots, mutant criminals and murderous scientists hell-bent on terrorizing Earth and the solar system. The bad guys were usually seeking world domination, which they inevitably intended to obtain via some overly complicated but fascinating scheme. As required by the genre, the good guys always managed to arrest the interplanetary villains before they could bring their devious schemes to fruition. Just in the nick of time of course. It was ideal literature for a certain somewhat nerdy would-be aerospace engineer. The books were all written in Dutch, and much later I found out that writer Bert Benson's real name was Adrianus Petrus Maria de Beer, which sounds about as futuristic in Dutch as is does in English. In spite of this, the stories breathed a kind of cosmopolitan atmosphere, with a diverse team of agents from various European countries (the leader was Dutch, naturally) flying to exotic countries, forgotten islands and hostile moons and planets. Their means of transportation was the Euro 5, a wedgeshaped rocket spaceplane with a set of large wings at the back and smaller 'canard' wings in front, four rotating ray-guns, and a small boat-shaped plane for short reconnaissance trips (which I now know looks a lot like NASA's M2-F3 'lifting body' experimental rocket plane of the early 1970s). In the final pages of each book, it was usually this marvelous machine that saved the day, if not the entire universe. For me this gigantic blue vehicle was really the centerpiece of the stories, rather than the colorful team of international heroes. I guess kids in other countries at the time were reading similar adventure books with rocket planes in a starring role.