On Oct. 3, 1942, Germany performed the first-ever successful test launch of a ballistic missile.
This missile was officially named Aggregat 4 (A4) but is more commonly known as the V-2. The V-2 was designed by the famous German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and it proved to be a deadly weapon during World War II.
During the landmark test, the rocket launched from an island off the Baltic coast of Germany called Peenemünde. It reached an altitude of 52.5 miles (84.5 kilometers) — just short of the Kármán Line, the widely recognized boundary of outer space at 62 miles (100 km) up — before landing on target 118 miles (190 km) away.
Why it mattered
The V-2 matters first of all as an instrument of death and terror, and it dealt plenty of both during World War II. The 46-foot-tall (14 meters) rocket introduced a new element to the battlefield: ultrafast weapon delivery.
The V-2 traveled at up to 3,400 mph (5,470 kph) and could carry a 2,200-pound (1,000 kilograms) warhead to a target up to 200 miles (320 km) away. Nazi Germany launched its first V-2 in combat on Sept. 6, 1944 and continued using the rockets through March 1945, just a month before the regime surrendered.
The Nazis employed the V-2 heavily during this time, but the rocket was not terribly accurate. So V-2s did not tend to lay waste to entire cities like plane-based bombing raids did during the war.
"The Army and Waffen-SS launched over 3,000 rockets, primarily against London and Antwerp, but the ones that actually reached a populated target only killed about 5,000 people," the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum wrote about the V-2.
"Against that total must be put the 10-20,000 concentration-camp prisoners who died in the SS camps connected to V-2 manufacturing," the museum added. "That makes it a rare and peculiar weapon — more than twice as many people died as the result of making it than did being hit by it."
The V-2 also helped usher the world into the space age, by showing what rockets are capable of.
"The V-2 was a revolutionary technological device," the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum wrote. "The space launch vehicles and the intercontinental ballistic missiles of the world virtually all trace their origin, one way or another, to this rocket."
That's particularly true of American launch vehicles, for von Braun — who was a member of the Nazi Party and a junior SS officer — and more than 100 members of his V-2 team came to the United States after the war as part of Project Paperclip. These scientists and engineers were first put to work at Fort Bliss in West Texas but moved to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama in 1950.
Once there, the German group "became the heart of the Army’s nuclear-armed ballistic missile development," the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum wrote in a description of Project Paperclip.
"Soon after the Soviets launched Sputnik in October 1957, [von Braun] and his German-led group, now numbering in the thousands (almost all native-born Americans), helped launch the first United States satellite, Explorer I," the museum added. "In 1960, von Braun’s division of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency was transferred to a new civilian space agency, NASA. The Huntsville Germans, most naturalized in 1954-1955, went on to lead the development of the Saturn rockets that put Americans on the moon in 1969."
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