V-2 (A4)

The A4, renamed V-2 by the propaganda ministry, is where rocketry stops being a private enthusiasm and becomes state industry. It was a single stage, 14.03 metres long, burning ethanol and liquid oxygen, and RussianSpaceWeb puts its engine at 26 tonnes of thrust on the surface, about 255 kilonewtons. That was enough to throw a 900 to 1,000 kilogram warhead 330 kilometres and to reach 96 kilometres on the way. The Smithsonian measured the airframe of its own example at 5 feet 5 inches across, 1.65 metres, which is the diameter used here.

The first launch attempt, on 13 June 1942, failed. So did the second. On 3 October 1942 the fourth vehicle worked, and the Smithsonian records it reaching 60 miles altitude and 125 miles downrange in a 296 second flight. That is the moment a machine built by people first left the atmosphere, and it happened eighteen months before the thing was ever fired at a city.

The engineering compromises are visible on the outside. Peenemünde wanted radio beam guidance and lost the argument for it to the bomber and interceptor programmes, so the V-2 flew on gyroscopes and accelerometers that cut the engine when the right velocity was reached. The Smithsonian is blunt about the result: a highly sophisticated pioneering inertial system that "could barely hit a giant urban area part of the time". The clipped fins are not aerodynamic cleverness either. They were sized so a military missile would fit through standard European rail tunnels.

The moral arithmetic is the part that should stay attached to this vehicle. Between 3,200 and 3,600 were fired at Allied targets from 8 September 1944, killing roughly 5,000 people. Against that sit the 10,000 to 20,000 concentration camp prisoners who died in the SS camps that built it. The Smithsonian calls it a rare and peculiar weapon: more than twice as many people died making it as died being hit by it.

The last combat firing was on 29 March 1945. The last flight of a captured vehicle was at White Sands on 28 June 1951, by which point the V-2 had become a free research rocket for the country that took its designers. Every large launch vehicle that follows on this page is descended from it, on both sides of the race.