A V-2 reached space years before Sputnik’s fame
Spaceflight’s theory came from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, and Hermann Oberth. Engineering caught up when a German V-2, flight MW 18014, crossed into space on a June 1944 vertical test—well before the public Space Race made orbit a Cold War scoreboard.
Science fiction lit the fuse. Around 1900, novels by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells spurred serious study of travel between worlds. Tsiolkovsky's 1903 treatise on exploring space with reaction devices was the first realistic proposal, and Goddard's 1919 paper made the idea an engineering prospect by fitting a de Laval nozzle to liquid-fuel rockets, influencing Oberth and Wernher von Braun. In 1929 the Slovene officer Hermann Noordung described a complete space station in The Problem of Space Travel.
Von Braun led the first large rocket programmes in Nazi Germany. After the war, Britain's Operation Backfire in October 1945 launched three or perhaps four V-2s near Cuxhaven; they flew inclined paths and fell short of space, but its report remains the fullest technical record of the weapon. The British Interplanetary Society's 1946 Megaroc plan would have sent test pilot Eric Brown on a sub-orbital hop by 1949, until Attlee's government chose to prioritise nuclear power and jet airliners. Meanwhile the US lofted fruit flies on a V-2 from White Sands in 1947, and the monkey Albert II reached space in June 1949 but died when his parachute failed. In July 1951 the Soviet dogs Dezik and Tsygan became the first dogs to fly and return safely.
The race began in earnest during the International Geophysical Year. Sputnik 1 launched on 4 October 1957 and Sputnik 2 carried Laika a month later. Explorer 1 answered in February 1958 and detected the Van Allen belt. The shock pushed Congress to turn NACA into NASA that July. Yuri Gagarin's single orbit on 12 April 1961 took 108 minutes; Gherman Titov circled 17 times that August, and Valentina Tereshkova, a former parachutist, reached orbit on Vostok 6 in June 1963.
The US landed men on the Moon in 1969. Since then, probes have visited every planet, crews have lived aboard Mir and the ISS, China has become the third nation to fly astronauts independently, and in 2020 SpaceX's Crew Dragon Demo-2 became the first commercial crewed flight to the station.
Source: History of spaceflight
