And they had Von Braun. So it is easy to draw a direct line between the V2 rocket — built by slave labourers and launched from Nazi-occupied Europe — and the first American in space. Probably, but perhaps not as soon. As with so many technological innovations, war hastened the development of the modern rocket and accelerated the space age. Even today, the fundamental technology of launchers remains the same as it did 70 years ago. The engine looks similar, rockets still use gyroscopic guidance and most are powered by liquid fuel.
All pioneered in the V2. Unwittingly, on a September day in my father had witnessed the dawn of the Space Age. Some of the twisted metal remnants of the V2 that crashed and exploded near Platt in are embossed with a three-letter code that signifies the factory in Nazi-occupied Europe where the part was made.
Until recently, historians thought all the later V2s were built under the direction of the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun in underground tunnels near Nordhausen, at the foot of Germany's Harz mountains.
But it now seems that the Nordhausen plant was only an assembly line, and the three-letter codes show that the Nazis made the V2 parts in factories as far afield as occupied Czechoslovakia, Sean Welch said.
Von Braun himself is a controversial character. He claimed not to know about Nazi atrocities but he was a member of the Nazi paramilitary SS "Schutzstaffel," meaning "protection squad" and according to the White Sands Missile Range Museum more than 12, forced laborers died on his V2 production line in a single year.
But von Braun was captured by the Americans after the war and became a pioneer of the Space Race; in , he was appointed director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, where he developed the rockets that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the moon. The American military in post-war Germany also captured several V2s at various stages of assembly and shipped them to the United States, where they became the foundation of the fledgling space program.
Tom Metcalfe is a journalist based in London who writes mainly about science, space, archaeology, the earth, and the oceans. The Smithsonian Institution's V-2 was acquired in from the U.
Army Air Forces, and was officially transferred on 1 May by what was now the U. Air Force. It was moved to the National Air Museum's storage facility in Suitland, Maryland in , and was restored in for exhibition in the new National Air and Space Museum building.
The V-2 is cylindrical, tapering down towards the base, with four clipped rectangular fins, and tapering down toward the top with an ogival warhead ending in a sharp pointed nose. The design of the clipped fins was influenced by the need to ship a military missile through standard European rail tunnels.
Overall, the rocket was shaped for supersonic flight, based on wind tunnel tests. The "dimpled" appearance of the rocket's skin, as is very evident in the Museum's specimen, is partly the result of spot welding, which, when cooled, especially around panels in place near ribs or stringers, contracted or shrunk unevenly, although the rocket's skin was also damaged by years of rough handling.
The Museum's artifact has a combustion chamber, but lacks plumbing and many internal components such as the guidance and control systems. The tanks were removed to lessen the weight supported by the fins. The water additive helped cool the motor, which developed maximum operating temperatures of about 4, F. The rocket was mainly constructed of thin sheet steel, welded, riveted, and braced around a wooden framework in some sections.
The nose cap was a fuse for detonating the explosive, 1, lbs of amatol, upon impact. Underneath the warhead was the instrument section, divided into four quadrants devoted to guidance and control, radio, and electrical systems.
The center section of the rocket was two half shells containing the aluminum-magnesium alloy propellant tanks, the lox tank below and the larger fuel tank above. The lox tank was insulated with glass wool to keep the super-cold lox at its desired temperature and also to prevent overheating from leftover propellants. The tail section contained the motor and adjoining turbopump, steam-generator, and associated plumbing.
The motor, comprising the combustion chamber and nozzle, was made of steel, while the pumps were of steel with aluminum-silicon alloy impellers and housings. The tanks for the hydrogen peroxide and potassium permanganate catalyst for driving the turbopumps were coated inside and out with an aluminum bronze alloy for corrosion protection. The V-2 A-4 evolved from secret experimental tests made between and by the German Army on smaller lox-alcohol liquid-fuel rockets, designated A-1 and A-2, of kg lbs.
These were followed by the1, kg 3, lb. The A-4 was designed in detail in The A-5, a redesign of the A-3 launched from to , was also very important, as it was the test-bed for guidance systems after the failure of the four A-3 launches in It was.
The moving spirits of the A-4's development were Dr. Dornberger, who became involved in the Army's rocket development in , and was the military head of the program from to During the last 18 months of the war he was responsible for training, supplying and servicing the operational V-2 rocket units.
Besides the A-4, other missiles, such as the Wasserfall, were developed here. In addition there were thousands of construction workers building the new A-4 Production Plant south of the test center; by this number included three thousand mostly East European forced laborers working construction.
Dornberger and Arthur Rudolph, the chief engineer of the factory, were among those responsible for deciding to exploit concentration-camp labor in the rocket program; Wernher von Braun was aware of these decisions and found himself increasingly involved in the management of camp labor as time went on. The first non-flight vehicles were finished and tested in , and the first flight vehicles were completed in This rocket attained an altitude of 60 miles and range of miles in a second flight, coming within 2.
On 22 November , Hitler ordered the mass production of the missile, and exactly one month later, Armaments Minister Speer founded the Special Committee A-4 to accelerate the process so that production might begin in summer Production required a large number of drawings to be prepared and special tools designed and built. After the damaging Royal Air Force bombing of the facility during the night of August , A-4 manufacturing was shifted to the underground plant of Mittelwerk at Nordhausen, in the Harz Mountains.
Undoubtedly, the Museum's V-2 was also made there. The initial cost of producing an A-4 rocket was , Reichmarks warhead and guidance equipment not included ; the average cost was later reduced to 75, RM. The rockets were made at Mittelwerk by 2, civilian technicians and approximately 10, prisoner laborers who lived in nearby barracks camp known as Dora, which became the main camp of Konzentrationslager Mittelbau in October The Dora prisoners lived in terrible conditions, especially during the first few months when the barracks had not been built, and prisoners were forced to live underground, and in the last few months of the war, when the food supply worsened and many prisoners from Auschwitz and other eastern camps were dumped into Mittelbau-Dora.
Of the approximately 20, deaths in Mittelbau-Dora, about half can be ascribed to the V-2 program. The V-1, a competing development launched by the Luftwaffe, was an air-breathing pulsejet-powered missile which inflicted a considerable amount of physical and psychological damage on Britain, Belgium and France.
Oberth sounding rocket German sounding rocket. Rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth agreed to build and fly a liquid propellant rocket to publicize the Fritz Lang film Frau im Mond. Oberth's design was too ambitious and the rocket was never completed in time for the film's premiere. But the engine developed for it would be further refined and used in the Mirak rocket, flown in Mirak Mirak - a 'Minimum Rocket' - was conceived by Rudolf Nebel to demonstrate the practicality of the liquid rocket, using the thrust chamber developed for the abandoned Oberth rocket.
Mirak was realized not by Nebel, but talented engineer Riedel. It flew over times in and convinced the German Army of the practicality of the rocket as a weapon of war. A1 German test vehicle. First in series of rockets leading to V Exploded at Kummersdorf during a test run. Considered aerodynamically unstable a stabilizing flywheel was mounted forward and no launch attempts were made.
A2 German test vehicle. First flight test rocket in the series that led to the V Two were built, dubbed Max and Moritz. Both were successfully flown. A3 German test vehicle. The A3 was the first large rocket attempted by Wernher von Braun's rocket team. It was equipped with an ambitious guidance package consisting of three gyroscopes and two integrating accelerometers.
The rocket was intended as a subscale prototype for the propulsion and control system technology planned for the much larger A4. All of the launches were failures, and a total redesign, the A5, was developed. A5 German test vehicle.
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