V-2 Rocket Reaches Space: First Man-Made Object

A forty-six-foot missile screamed off the launch pad at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast, punched through the atmosphere at 3,580 miles per hour, and reached an altitude of 52.5 miles — crossing the boundary of space for the first time in human history. On October 3, 1942, Nazi Germany's A4 rocket, later designated the V-2, became the first man-made object to leave Earth's atmosphere, and the modern space age was born from the ambitions of a totalitarian weapons program. The rocket was the brainchild of Wernher von Braun, a 30-year-old engineer whose childhood obsession with spaceflight had led him into an uncomfortable alliance with the Third Reich. Von Braun wanted to reach the stars. The Wehrmacht wanted a weapon that could strike London from continental Europe, beyond the range of any existing artillery. Both got what they wanted in the A4: a liquid-fueled ballistic missile carrying a one-ton warhead at supersonic speed, impossible to intercept by any existing defense. Development had consumed a decade, millions of Reichsmarks, and the forced labor of thousands of concentration camp prisoners at the Mittelwerk underground factory. Between September 1944 and March 1945, over 3,000 V-2s were launched against London, Antwerp, and other Allied targets, killing approximately 9,000 people. An estimated 12,000 forced laborers died during the rocket's production — more people killed building the weapon than were killed by it. When Germany collapsed, both the Americans and Soviets scrambled to capture V-2 technology and the scientists who created it. Operation Paperclip brought von Braun and over a hundred German engineers to the United States, where they formed the core of America's nascent rocket program. Soviet teams recovered their own V-2 components and personnel. The Space Race between the superpowers was, at its foundation, a competition between two teams working from the same German blueprints. The V-2's October 3 flight lasted just 190 seconds, but it proved that escaping Earth's gravity was an engineering problem, not a fantasy.