The first human-made object in space was a Nazi weapon
On 20 June 1944 a German test rocket climbed so high that, by today's 100 km definition, it crossed into space, the first artificial object ever to do so. It was a V-2, a supersonic missile built to hit Allied cities, and its technology later helped carry both superpowers into the space race.
The rocket's story begins with a teenage space fan. In the late 1920s Wernher von Braun read Hermann Oberth's book on rockets reaching interplanetary space and caught the craze for rocket cars sparked by Fritz von Opel and Max Valier. Inspired, he launched a homemade rocket car along a crowded pavement and ended up being questioned by the police. As a student in Berlin he helped Oberth test liquid-fuel motors, and an artillery officer, Walter Dornberger, secured army funding for his work. His 1934 doctoral thesis was classified and stayed secret until 1960.
Von Braun's team drew openly on the published designs of the American physicist Robert Goddard. The rocket they developed, called Aggregat-4, needed four breakthroughs: a huge liquid-fuel engine, supersonic aerodynamics, gyroscopic guidance and rudders that steered the exhaust. Its fuel was ethanol cut with a quarter water, burned with liquid oxygen; the water lowered the flame temperature and helped cool the engine. Hitler was unimpressed at first but later backed mass production as a morale-boosting wonder weapon.
From September 1944 more than 3,000 were fired, first at London and later at Antwerp and Liège. They arrived faster than sound with no audible warning and could not be intercepted. A 2011 BBC documentary estimated around 9,000 people died in the attacks, while some 12,000 forced labourers and camp prisoners died building them. Historians judge that the missiles changed little in the war despite their enormous cost.
When fighting ended, the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union scrambled for the hardware, the factories and the engineers. Through programmes such as Operation Paperclip, the V-2 became the ancestor of later ballistic missiles and spaceflight.
Source: V-2 rocket
