The age of the space rocket began on Oct. 3, 1942, on a small Baltic island off the north coast of Germany, when the Nazis’ Peenemunde project conducted the first successful test of its A-4, later known to the world as the V-2. Riding a fiery column of burning gas, the operational V-2 scraped the underside of space, achieving a speed of nearly 3,500 mph, which was enough to give it a range of almost 190 miles. “We have invaded space with our rocket for the first time,” Col. Walter Dornberger, the project director, boasted at a celebratory dinner in the Peenemunde officers’ club on the evening after the first launch. Domberger reminded his colleagues that their most urgent job was to perfect the rocket as a weapon. Space travel, he said, would be “a peacetime task.” But when Dornberger’s colleagues finally turned their talents to space travel, they were playing for another team. Led by Wernher von Braun, Germany’s best and brightest rocket men made it possible for the United States to win the cold-war race to the moon.
The Germans didn’t invent the rocket, but they did devise the engines, fuel pumps and guidance system that made it work for both intercontinental warfare and space travel. In its most primitive form–a tube packed with gunpowder–the rocket was invented by the Chinese in the early 13th century. More than 500 years later, William Congreve, a British Army colonel, mass-produced a crude rocket that could carry a 20-pound warhead nearly three miles. Fired en masse, the weapons were devastating; Copenhagen was burned to the ground by a barrage of 25,000 Congreve rockets in 1807, during the Napoleonic Wars. A few years later the British Navy’s bombardment of Fort McHenry inspired Francis Scott Key to write about “the rocket’s red glare.”
In this century many brilliant scientists and engineers worked on developing rockets. Robert Goddard, a physics professor at Clark University in Massachusetts, flew model rockets from his Aunt Effie’s strawberry patch. In 1926 he became the first man to build and fly a liquid-fueled rocket. Goddard pioneered many of the features found on liquid-fueled rockets to this day. But he was the archetypal lone inventor and suspicious of publicity; he published so little that his work had scant impact at the time. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, an obscure Russian math teacher, was perhaps the greatest theoretician in the history of rocketry, figuring out virtually all the equations that govern rocket propulsion. Unlike Goddard, he did publish. But his papers were ignored–until the German rocket program began to burgeon in the 1920s.
During World War II many relatively small rockets were used, ranging from shoulder-fired antitank weapons (“bazookas”) to multibarrel field artillery (“Stalin organs”). But none of those weapons could come close to penetrating space, as the V-2 did. The Germans built their revolutionary rockets with singleminded brutality, freely spending the lives of slave laborers. Concentration-camp inmates toiled in tunnels at Nordhausen, in the Harz Mountains of central Germany, to build about 6,000 V-2s. About 20,000 prisoners died on the job. In one tunnel, Gallery 39, the fumes from the galvanizing shop were so toxic and the ventilation so poor that the life expectancy of the prisoners working there was less than one month.
The V-2 might have won the war for Germany, but Hitler delayed its development after dreaming one night that the rocket would never be operational against England. He changed his mind later, asserting: “This is the decisive weapon of the war.” About 1,000 V-2s hit southern England between September 1944 and late March 1945. Only about 2,700 people were killed, because the guidance systems could not pinpoint prime targets. But the menace alone–the rockets slammed into London without warning, traveling at more than three times the speed of sound–traumatized Winston Churchill’s government. For the Nazis, however, it was too late. Advancing Allied armies overran the V-2 bases. As the end neared, von Braun led 118 of his colleagues on a march to the West, where they could surrender to the Americans instead of the Russians.
The Germans did good work for their new employers. They built huge rockets fueled by liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. The emigres designed so well that the big rockets used for today’s space missions are merely improved models of their 30-year-old designs. The man who headed production of the giant Saturn V rocket, which took the Apollo astronauts to the moon in 1969, was Arthur Rudolph, who had been technical director at Nordhausen. After the moon landing, Rudolph was awarded NASA’s highest decoration, the Distinguished Service Medal.
Then, in 1982, the Justice Department accused him of responsibility for the deaths of thousands of slave laborers. He denied the charges but admitted under oath that he once ordered workers to watch when 57 slave laborers were hanged outside his office. Rudolph gave up his U.S. citizenship and returned to Germany, where he lived quietly until his death last year. “The Americans made me a hero, and then they threw me out,” he complained not long before his death. A few of his old German colleagues still live in retirement around Huntsville, Ala., where they built rockets for America’s space program and its nuclear arsenal. They avoid publicity, fearful of Nazi hunters. Their accomplishments live on, for war or for peace.
THE SPACE DIVIDEND
From Global telecommunication networks to Tang, space research has resulted in some pretty handy products back on Earth. Among the hundreds of spinoffs:
Cleanup Hit: The Dustbuster got its start when Black & Decker was asked to develop cordless tools for sampling lunar rocks and soil.
Defending Liberty: The Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of Liberty are kept corrosion-free by coatings developed to protect launch pads.
Sunny Sums: The same type of solar cells that power the $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope keep a $5 calculator adding and subtracting.
Flub Dub: The heart-rate monitors used on exercise machines were developed to keep track of astronauts’ exertion.
Clear Vision: The scratch-resistant coating that makes plastic eyeglass lenses practical was first developed to protect plastic spacecraft parts
Outer Shell: The fabric used for Apollo-era space-suits now covers the Georgia Dome in Atlanta and airport terminals in Denver.
