V-2 Rocket: The Nazi Weapon That Started the Space Age
Before NASA, Sputnik and the race to the Moon, there was the V-2—the world’s first operational long-range ballistic missile and one of the most advanced machines of the Second World War.
Developed by Wernher von Braun and his team at Nazi Germany’s secret Peenemünde research centre, the rocket began as the A4 programme. On 3 October 1942, it completed its first successful test flight. A later launch reached an altitude of 174.6 kilometres, making it the first human-made vehicle to enter outer space.
With a one-tonne warhead, a range of approximately 320 kilometres and a maximum speed of Mach 4.8, the V-2 was impossible for Allied aircraft and anti-aircraft guns to intercept. More than 3,000 missiles were launched, primarily against London and Antwerp.
But the V-2 was also an enormously expensive and ineffective weapon. Germany invested around two billion Reichsmarks in the programme, yet all V-2 attacks combined delivered only about 3,000 tonnes of explosives. Thousands of concentration camp prisoners died producing the rockets at the underground Mittelwerk factory—far more people than were killed by the weapon itself.
After Germany’s defeat, the United States and Soviet Union competed to capture its scientists, technical documents and surviving rockets. Through Operation Paperclip, von Braun and his engineers helped develop America’s Redstone missile and later contributed to the Apollo programme.
The Soviet Union reconstructed the V-2 and used its technology to develop the R-1 and R-2 missiles. This technological lineage eventually led to the R-7—the rocket that launched Sputnik 1 in 1957.
Born as a weapon of destruction, the V-2 unexpectedly helped humanity take its first steps towards the stars.
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