The rocket that reached space, and what it cost

Explore the V‑2 in 3D

“Today the spaceship was born”

Peenemünde, 3 October 1942

On the Baltic coast of Germany, at a secret army research centre called Peenemünde, a 14‑metre rocket painted in black and white stood on Test Stand VII. Two earlier test flights had failed. At 3:58 in the afternoon this one lifted off, rolled onto its planned curve and kept climbing. When its engine shut down it was flying at more than 1,300 metres per second. It came down in the sea 190 km away, after reaching an altitude of 84.5 km: higher than anything people had ever built.

The rocket was called the A4, the fourth design in a series. Its commander, General Walter Dornberger, celebrated that evening with his engineers, among them the 30‑year‑old technical director Wernher von Braun.

“Do you realise what we accomplished today? … Today the spaceship was born.”Walter Dornberger to his team, as he recalled it in his memoir “V‑2” (1952)

But the army had not paid for a spaceship. Rockets were attractive to the German army because the Treaty of Versailles, which limited Germany's artillery after the First World War, said nothing about them. The A4 was designed from the start to carry one tonne of explosives over 300 km. Joseph Goebbels' propaganda later renamed it Vergeltungswaffe 2, “Retaliation weapon 2”: the V‑2.

Why it was such a leap

Engineering

Before the A4, the largest liquid‑fuel rockets in the world weighed a few hundred kilograms. The A4 weighed 12.5 tonnes. Almost everything about it had to be invented, and many of those inventions are still in rockets today. On 20 June 1944 a test rocket fired straight up reached 175 km, the first human‑made object to cross into space.

• 01 A Turbopump

  Small rockets push their propellant out of the tanks with high‑pressure gas, so the tanks must be thick and heavy. The A4 instead used a steam turbine, driven by decomposing hydrogen peroxide, to spin two pumps that pushed about 125 kg of alcohol and liquid oxygen into the engine every second. See the Turbopump in 3D

• 02 An engine cooled by its own fuel

  The flame inside the combustion chamber reached about 2,700 °C, hot enough to melt steel. The alcohol flowed through a jacket around the chamber before it was burned, carrying the heat away, and a thin film of alcohol seeped through small holes to protect the inner wall.

• 03 Guidance with no pilot and no radio

  Two gyroscopes held the rocket steady and tipped it slowly toward its target. Graphite vanes in the exhaust and rudders on the fins steered it. An accelerometer measured the speed, and at exactly the right moment it shut the engine down: the Brennschluss. After that, the rocket simply fell along its curve, like a thrown stone. See the gyros in 3D

• 04 Faster than any wind tunnel

  Nobody knew how air behaves at five times the speed of sound. Peenemünde built a supersonic wind tunnel that reached Mach 4.4, one of the fastest in the world, to shape the fins and the nose.

Built underground, by prisoners

Mittelwerk and the Mittelbau‑Dora camp, 1943–1945

On the night of 17 August 1943, almost 600 British bombers attacked Peenemünde. The raid convinced the Nazi leadership to move rocket production somewhere bombs could not reach: a network of tunnels inside the Kohnstein hill near Nordhausen, in central Germany. The factory was called the Mittelwerk, “Central Works”, and it was run with the help of the SS.

The workers were concentration camp prisoners, many of them from occupied France, Poland and the Soviet Union. Through the first winter they lived inside the tunnels themselves, sleeping in bunks next to the blasting and the drilling, with almost no water, light or sanitation. Many died of exhaustion, disease and cold. Prisoners accused of sabotage were hanged in the tunnels, sometimes from the cranes of the assembly line, in front of the others.

The camp, later called Mittelbau‑Dora, held about 60,000 prisoners before the end of the war, and around 20,000 of them died. Historians estimate that about 12,000 forced labourers and prisoners died producing the V‑2.

It is one of the very few weapons that killed more people while it was being made than when it was used.

The engineers knew. Wernher von Braun, who joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and the SS in 1940, visited the Mittelwerk several times and later admitted he had seen the conditions. Arthur Rudolph, the production manager in the tunnels, later helped build the Saturn V moon rocket in the USA. In 1984, under investigation for his role at Mittelwerk, he gave up his US citizenship and left the country.

Silent arrival

Paris, London, Antwerp · September 1944 – March 1945

The first V‑2s were fired at Paris on 8 September 1944. That same evening, at 6:43, one fell on Staveley Road in Chiswick, west London. It killed three people: a 63‑year‑old woman, a three‑year‑old girl and a soldier on leave. To avoid panic, the government blamed the blast on a gas main. Londoners, who knew better, started calling the rockets “flying gas mains”.

The V‑2 was terrifying for a new reason: it gave no warning. The V‑1 flying bomb, used since June, could be heard buzzing toward its target and could be shot down. The V‑2 fell from the edge of space at about three times the speed of sound. The explosion came first. Only then did the people around it hear the double crack of its sonic boom and the roar of its fall, arriving after the rocket that made them. There was no defence against it except capturing the launch sites.

The rockets were launched from mobile units hidden in the forests and parks of the occupied Netherlands, mainly around The Hague. A convoy of about 30 vehicles could set one up, fuel it and fire it in a couple of hours, then drive away.

1. 25 November 1944A V‑2 hits a crowded Woolworths store in New Cross, south London, on a Saturday lunchtime. 168 people die.
2. 16 December 1944A V‑2 hits the Rex cinema in Antwerp, Belgium, during a film. 567 people die, the deadliest single V‑2 strike of the war.
3. 27 March 1945One of the last V‑2s destroys Hughes Mansions, a block of flats in Stepney, east London: 134 dead. Hours later the very last one falls on Orpington, in Kent, and kills Ivy Millichamp, 34, the last civilian killed in Britain by enemy action in the war.

In seven months, about 1,400 V‑2s were fired at Britain, most at London, and more than 1,600 at Antwerp, whose port was the Allies' main supply harbour. Liège and other Belgian cities, Paris, and in the last weeks even the Remagen bridge in Germany, were hit too. In London, V‑2s killed 2,754 people and injured 6,523 more. In total they killed about 9,000 people.

Yet for all its cost, the V‑2 did not change the course of the war. Each one carried a single tonne of explosives and could miss its aiming point by several kilometres. Germany poured enormous resources into it, at a time when it was losing the war on every front.

From weapon to spaceship

1945 and after

When the war ended, the Allies raced each other for the V‑2. Von Braun and much of his team surrendered to the US Army on 2 May 1945. American soldiers emptied the Mittelwerk of parts for about 100 rockets just before the area was handed to the Soviet Union. Under Operation Paperclip, more than a hundred German rocket specialists were taken to the USA, their past largely overlooked.

At White Sands, in the New Mexico desert, the captured rockets now carried scientific instruments instead of explosives. On 24 October 1946, a camera on V‑2 No. 13 took the first photographs of the Earth from space, from 105 km up. The Soviet Union, with its own captured engineers and parts, copied the V‑2 as the R‑1, the first step toward the R‑7 that launched Sputnik in 1957.

Von Braun went on to lead the team that built the Saturn V, which took astronauts to the Moon in 1969. The road from the launch table at Peenemünde to the Moon is a short one: the same ideas, many of the same people.

So the V‑2 is two stories at once. One is about a small group of engineers who solved problems nobody had solved before. The other is about the prisoners in the tunnels and the people in the streets of London and Antwerp. Neither story is complete without the other.