Launch Vehicles

A COMMON ANCESTOR: THE V-2

Americans have ridden a wide variety of rockets into space-but it all goes back to the V-2

Mars, the Bringer of War by Gustav Holst (from The Planets)

Launch vehicles on both sides of the Iron Curtain traced their origins back to one rocket-the V-2. Concieved by German rocket scientists like Dr. Wernher von Braun during the Nazi regime, these pioneering ballistic missiles were first flown from Peenemunde on the Baltic coast during World War II, and were used operationally against British and continental European cities. Originally known as the A4, Hitler called it his second "vengeance weapon" (Vergeltungswaffen-2), after the V-1 flying bomb; hence the name V-2. (It should be pointed out that the Nazis used slave labor from concentration camps to build V-2s during the war. Thousands of slave laborers died as the Nazi war machine cranked out upwards of 700 V-2s a month.) In this undated wartime photo, a V-2 missile is pictured on the pad at Peenemunde during the stacking process. NASA Photo.

Dr. Wernher von Braun (R, with Walt Disney) was one of the top rocket scientists at Peenemunde. Born March 23, 1912 in Wirsitz, he and his colleagues experimented with rocketry extensively between the World Wars. Nazi Germany had placed much higher priority on rocket development than the Allies, both before and during the war; as the war in Europe drew to a close (and the atomic bomb was nearing operational status), it became obvious that this advanced technology would be vital to postwar security for both the Western allies and the Soviets. After the war, both the Soviets and the Americans rounded up as many V-2s and German rocket scientists as they could find; the Americans called it Operation Overcast, and later, Operation Paperclip. Dr. von Braun was worried that Hitler might have ordered the SS to destroy all V-2 hardware and documentation-or worse, the scientists themselves-before the advancing Allies could get it. When von Braun heard that American tanks were on the way, he ordered his aides to hide the documents-14 tons worth!-from the SS. We got von Braun and some 120 of his top people-and, significantly, those 14 tons of V-2 documents. (When they surrendered to the U.S. 44th Division, Dr. von Braun was recovering from a car accident-his arm was in a cast.) They worked first at Ft. Bliss, TX, and later at White Sands Proving Ground (later White Sands Missile Range), NM, and starting in 1950, at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, AL. von Braun was in the public eye well before the dawn of the Space Age, having published numerous articles and books on rocketry and space travel. He remained in charge of the Huntsville team well into the Space Age, and his teams developed the mighty Saturn I and Saturn V rockets that sent men to the Moon. He retired from NASA in June of 1972, and died of cancer in Alexandria, VA, on June 15, 1977. NASA Photo.

Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, similar V-2 testing was going on. The advancing Red Army had captured enough parts, material, documents, and hardware to build about a dozen V-2/A-4 rockets. They tested them both in occupied Germany and in the Soviet Union under a project known as Backfire. Here, we see the towering figure in what would become the Soviet space program: Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, the man considered the father of Soviet spaceflight. He was born Jan. 12, 1907, and like many of the Soviets' best and brightest, spent a lot of time in the gulags in the 1940s. The Soviets, led by Korolev (released, as he had been imprisoned, at Stalin's behest), back-engineered the V-2 to create their first ballistic missile, the R-1. Korolev's design bureau would ultimately design the R-7s that put satellites and men in space. Sadly, this iconographic figure in Soviet history died on Jan. 14, 1966, due to complications following a botched surgery. Today, the Korolev Design Bureau has become known as Energia. NASA Photo.

The V-2 and its Soviet copy, the R-1, led to this vehicle, the R-2A, a research version of the R-2 missile, which had the NATO codename "Sibling." 13 of these were launched before 1960, often carrying dogs to altitudes of 200 km (124 mi) or more. Information gleaned from these flights was used to design the capsule that carried the dog Laika into space on Sputnik 2. The influence of the V-2 on this enlarged design is obvious. NASA Photo.

Postwar, tests were carried out with captured and/or "back-engineered" V-2s. These were done with the intention of developing longer-range, heavier ballistic missiles, as well as possible launch vehicles for future space exploration. American V-2 launches were generally carried out from White Sands, and later, Cape Canaveral, FL. Here, a V-2 is used to launch one of the first American space-vehicle research programs, code-named Bumper. Bumper employed a V-2 as the first stage, and a pencil-like, 700-lb rocket known as a WAC Corporal as an upper stage. This is the first Bumper launch-indeed, the first rocket launch of any kind-from Cape Canaveral, on July 24, 1950. Meanwhile, the Soviets were doing the same thing....The basic V-2 was 46 ft tall, weighed about 28,000 lbs, and was fueled by alcohol and LOX. NASA Photo.

The launch of the V-2-based Bumper 8 on July 24, 1950, was the first-ever rocket launch from Cape Canaveral (Pad 3, to be exact). On July 24, 2000, surviving members of the Bumper 8 team gathered at the Cape to participate in ceremonies honoring the 50th anniversary of the launch, and to witness the launch of a scale-model V-2-WAC Corporal rocket. NASA Photo.