(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Hidden History: The First Space Launch [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-28
Everybody knows about the Space Race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s, which began with the Russian Sputnik and ended with the American moon landing. But in reality, the first man-made object to enter outer space was not Russian, and not American either. It was German.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
V-2 rocket on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum
Wernher Von Braun had always been interested in rockets. He had carefully studied the published work on rocketry being done by Robert Goddard in the US. In 1928 Von Braun had seen a public demonstration of the Opal automobile company’s rocket-powered experimental car, the “Opal-RAK”, and was inspired to begin his own tinkering with model rockets. By 1930 he was working as an assistant to German rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth and was helping to design and build liquid-fueled test rockets.
When the Nazi Party took control of Germany in 1933, Von Braun was finishing up his doctoral degree and was carrying out his own rocket experiments. Meanwhile, a German Army artillery officer named Walter Dornberger was already working on solid-fueled military rockets, taking advantage of a loophole in the Versailles Treaty which, while strictly limiting German research on aircraft and artillery guns, said nothing about rockets or missiles.
Dornberger heard about Von Braun’s work and after talking with him was impressed enough to combine their efforts and obtain further research money. By 1936, Von Braun’s team of around 90 engineers and technicians, working at a camp near Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea, had successfully tested two rockets that were designated Aggregat A-1 and A-2, were working on an A-3, and had also begun work on a newer engine that would be capable of producing a thrust of 55,000 pounds.
Both Von Braun and Dornberger saw the military implications and submitted a proposal for the “A-4”, which would be vehicle-transportable and could carry a 1-ton explosive warhead at least 170 miles. It would require substantial technical advancements in rocket engine design, aerodynamics, gyroscopic control, and guidance, but by the time the United States entered the war in December 1941 Von Braun had produced a workable design. Dornberger went to the Nazis for further funding.
Von Braun’s A-4 stood almost 46 feet tall and weighed 13.5 tons. Most of this length consisted of the fuel tanks, one of which contained 75% alcohol and the other liquid oxygen. These were pumped into the engine’s combustion chamber and ignited, producing thrust for about 65 seconds. After the engine cut off, the missile continued to glide on a ballistic path, reaching a height of about 50 miles before arcing back and soaring to the ground. A gyroscope connected to moveable tail fins was used for guidance, giving it an accuracy of about two miles. Some versions were guided by a radio beam from the ground that was used to measure velocity. The missile’s range was adjusted by varying the amount of fuel, and the warhead was detonated by a contact fuse, which set off the one-ton charge of Amatol explosive. The first successful test flight was in October 1942.
Hitler, however, was not particularly impressed by the A-4. Not only did he consider it to be just a big expensive artillery shell (the rocket’s payload was only half that of a single Ju-88 bomber), but he assumed that its design was so complicated that Germany would already have won the war before a usable rocket weapon could ever be perfected and mass-produced. Von Braun’s efforts were given a low priority.
By 1943, however, Germany’s military situation had begun to reverse and things were going badly. Hitler was now desperate for some sort of “wonder weapon” that would allow him to avoid defeat and pull out a win, and he looked again at the A-4. After Von Braun assured him the rocket would be ready, Hitler ordered full-scale production, dubbing it “Vengeance Weapon Two”. A factory for V-2 manufacture was set up at Nordhausen, near the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp where political prisoners and “undesirables” from Buchenwald were conscripted as slave laborers to do all the production work. Other factories were begun near the Dachau concentration camp in Germany and the Mauthausen camp in Austria.
The ambitious Nazi plans called for the production of 2,000 V-2 rockets a month, with launches averaging perhaps 350 a week. In the end, though, production was crippled by economic shortages and by Allied bombing attacks (including a raid on Peenemünde, which by now had over 5,000 personnel). In total, only some 6000 V-2s were produced before the war ended. The first operational launch was in September 1944 against Paris. Some 3000 launches followed over the next six months, aimed at London, Paris, Brussels, and Antwerp. Near the end of the war, almost a dozen V-2s were also fired at the Remagen bridge over the Rhine River in an unsuccessful attempt to destroy it. V-2 missiles killed 6,000-9,000 civilians, but at least 12,000 and perhaps 20,000 concentration camp prisoners died in the slave-labor factories, making it the only weapon in history that killed more people producing it than were targeted by it.
In military terms, the V-2 was a spectacular failure: it chewed up a huge amount of Nazi economic and industrial resources, but its actual effect on the war was negligible (despite the civilian casualties it caused). In the technological and cultural sense, though, the rocket was an inadvertent and unintentional success, providing the first important milestone on the road to space exploration.
The exact boundary line marking the “edge of space” has always been a matter of some debate. There is no sharp demarcation between “atmosphere” and “vacuum”, as the one fades imperceptibly into the other. Earth’s atmosphere is usually divided into several layers. The layer extending about 10 miles above the Earth’s surface is the troposphere. It contains most of the planet’s air, and all of its weather. The troposphere is characterized by a decrease in temperature as you go higher in altitude. The point at which the temperature then begins to rise as you go higher marks the beginning of the stratosphere, which contains most of our ozone layer and is heated by ultraviolet radiation. At a height of around 30 miles, the temperature begins to drop once again with height—which marks the beginning of the mesosphere. This extends to a height of about 50 miles, where the temperature begins to rise yet again, a point known as the mesopause.
Some scientists, in an attempt to have a clearly-marked physical boundary, have defined “space” as beginning at the level of the mesopause. However, this is variable and its physical elevation changes according to where you are on the Earth’s surface. And so other authorities have tried to reach a level of precision by arbitrarily defining a specific altitude at which “space” begins—a point that was named the “Karman Line” after the American atmospheric scientist Theodore Karman. (Karman himself defined the line as the point where there was not enough atmosphere to aerodynamically maneuver an aircraft, making it a spacecraft—which is around 52 miles.) NASA and the Pentagon defined “outer space” as beginning at an altitude of 50 miles. (This definition in turn led the Air Force to retroactively class some of its X-15 test pilots, who had exceeded 50 miles in some flights, as “astronauts”.) Since that time, the US military had adopted a different definition: they now define “space” as being the lowest altitude at which an orbiting satellite can go without being de-orbited. This works out to around 56 miles.
In 1960, however, the International Aeronautic Federation, the Swiss organization (known by the French initials FAI) which has always been the acknowledged repository of aviation records, formally defined the Karman line as 100 kilometers, or 62.1 miles, and this is the standard that has been adopted by most—but not all—of the world. Below the Karman Line lies each individual nation’s legal sovereign airspace; above it lies free space which can be openly navigated.
By any of these proposed standards, though, the first flight to reach the Karman Line and enter “outer space” was not done with that intention.
In early 1943, the A-4 was suffering from design issues, with some 70% of launches resulting in failures. This led to a slew of redesigns and fixes, and by the summer of 1944 things appeared to be satisfactory. So on June 20, 1944, a test flight was scheduled at Peenemünde, designated “MW 18014”. This was to be a vertical launch that would determine how high the rocket could go and to examine its behavior in the near-vacuum of the upper atmosphere. Because the A-4 did not have sufficient thrust to reach orbit, the test rocket flew a vertical ballistic trajectory, going straight up and straight down and impacting the ground. But measurements showed that it had reached a maximum height of 189 kilometers (117.5 miles). At the time in 1944 there was no significance to this figure, but today, with the Karman Line set at 100 km, this obscure V-2 test flight is retroactively considered to be the first confirmed man-made object to reach the limits of outer space.
After the war, both the United States and the Soviet Union, recognizing the potential effectiveness of ballistic missiles carrying atomic weapons, made every effort to capture as much of the German V-2 technology as they could. The US captured 300 railroad cars full of V-2 parts and over 100 German researchers and technicians, including then-General Dornberger and also the ultimate prize—Wernher Von Braun. He had specifically traveled towards Allied forces so he could surrender to the Americans instead of the Russians. The V-2 design became the template for all of the early Cold War rocket and missile research in both the US, where Von Braun assumed a leadership role in the American space effort, and in the USSR, where Sergei Korolev adapted the German technology for the Soviet rocket program.
Today there are around two dozen German V-2 missiles on display in museums in the United States, Germany, France, Britain, Australia, Poland and the Netherlands. Within the US, complete V-2s can be seen at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in DC, the US Air Force Museum in Dayton OH, the Cosmosphere museum in Kansas, and the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville AL.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/28/2290848/-Hidden-History-The-First-Space-Launch?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
