The V-2 Rocket: Nazi Terror Weapon That Launched the Space Age

The first photograph of Earth from space, taken in October 1946, was captured by a camera strapped to a captured Nazi vengeance weapon. This episode tells the story of the V-2, the world's first modern ballistic missile, from the German rocket craze of the late 1920s and a teenage Wernher von Braun arrested for launching a fireworks-powered wagon down a public street, to the classified work at Peenemunde that invented supersonic aerodynamics, liquid-fuel engines, hydrogen-peroxide turbopumps, and graphite vanes that steered the rocket from inside its own exhaust.

We examine the air-burst problem solved with tin trousers, the technicians who drank the ethanol fuel until management poisoned it, and the move to the underground Mittelwerk factory, where an estimated 20,000 enslaved laborers died, more than the weapon killed in combat. The episode covers mobile launches from forests, the strikes on London and Antwerp including a packed movie theater, the silent arrival of a missile faster than sound, the British calculation that stopping one V-2 would take 320,000 flak shells, and the Double Cross system that used turned spies to walk the impact points away from central London. It ends with Operation Paperclip, the Soviet seizure of factories and blueprints, and the direct line from the V-2 to Sputnik and Redstone.

• How 75 percent ethanol and 25 percent water kept the engine from melting itself
• Analog guidance: gyroscopes, gears, and voltage steering a rocket without microchips
• Why one physicist called the half-billion-dollar V-2 program an act of unilateral disarmament
• The race between Operation Paperclip and the Soviets for scientists and 300 rail cars of parts
• The uncomfortable link between a concentration camp and the dawn of the space age