V-2 rocket

Once operational, Spectrum will carry payloads of up to 1,000 kilograms into low Earth orbit with an expected cadence of around 30 launches a year.

Now, for the record, the first European rocket to reach space was a Nazi V-2 rocket, which was launched from Peenemünde back on June the 20th, 1944.

This was the first successful German V-2 launch to exceed the Kármán line, the internationally recognised 100-kilometre boundary where space begins.

It reached an apogee of approximately 176 kilometres, making it the first man-made object to enter outer space and the first suborbital spaceflight.

It was part of a series of vertical test launches that June to study the rocket's behaviour in the near vacuum of space.

Another launch also in June 1944 reached an even higher altitude of around 179 kilometres.

The first successful V-2 flight overall was back on October 3, 1942, also from Peenemünde.

It reached somewhere between 85 and 90 kilometres in altitude, which the Nazis celebrated as reaching the edge of space, but in reality didn't cross the Kármán line.

The Army wouldn't buy it 'cause they said, "That's not as good as artillery." You know, Goddard gave the plans to the world.

The Germans picked up the plans at the, uh, Library of Congress and made the V-2 rocket that hit London using Goddard's liquid-fueled plan.

This is not new technology.

It's century-old technology.

When Mittelwerk was captured, it was in full production mode, and US troops seized enough parts and hardware to build over 100 missiles.

Over in the States, the military started a campaign of test launches using the V2s as what we call sounding rockets.

Now, if you don't know what a sounding rocket is, a sounding rocket is designed to be small, cheap-

It doesn't go where you think it goes.

Listener, I apologize.

Either way, took resources away from the reactor because he jacked up his staging.

And we, well, I mean Americans, you, took resources away from Nazi Germany and shipped those first V2s over to the US, reassembled them in Mexico, and flew them for all kinds of purposes, some of them military, some of them scientific.

One of them landed in Mexico.

We now move from British planes to German military hardware.

One of the most destructive weapons developed by Nazi Germany was the V2 rocket, the forerunner to later ballistic missiles.

Each rocket bore a warhead containing 900 kilograms of explosives, and it's thought that around 3,000 rockets were launched at Allied targets during the Second World War.

We now join two brothers who are on the search for a V2 rocket, which fortunately never hit its target and ended up in a farmer's field.

The hunt is focused near the village of Marden in Kent.

Amateur military archaeologists Colin and Sean Welsh are on the trail of a V2 that struck here at 2.15 a.m. on the 9th of March, 1945.

Aerial imagery taken after the war shows it came down in this field.

We've excavated several V2 rockets and V1 flying bombs, so I'm afraid to say we've become experts.

The Heverswerksstelle Pinamunde, abbreviated as HVP, became one of five military proving grounds and the site for the development of several World War II guided missiles.

The most notorious was the world's first operational liquid fuel rocket, the V-2, known to its designers as the A-4.

The V-2 rocket was the progenitor of all modern rockets and a direct forerunner of the Saturn V moon rocket.

It was the first ballistic missile and the first man-made object launched into space.

It also took an extraordinary amount of testing to get right.

When finally used against the Allies in World War II, V-2 rockets were responsible for the deaths of around 7,000 people, but 20,000 had died during construction of them.

Most of those were slave labour workers from the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp As Roy Irons pointed out in his book, Hitler's Terror Weapons, however, by 1943 the Germans were doing so badly in the war that Hitler was determined to press on with testing the weapon in order to build German morale and show his troops the war was still winnable.

But still the testing gave rise to embarrassments and mistakes.

Cheap, lightweight, radio-controlled target drones for use, again, in training.

If you listened to the Lions Led by Donkeys episode on Operations Aphrodite and Anvil, You'll recall that the US Air Force and Navy, respectively, had both experimented with converting retired aircraft into remote-controlled bombs loaded with explosives to be flown into high-value targets like German U-boat pens and factories producing the Nazis' deadly V-1 and V-2 rocket systems.

You can listen to Lions to learn how that endeavour went.

Not well.

And supposedly, they did build a small number of them which had been fitted with a downward-facing video camera so they could be used for reconnaissance missions.

And this is an innovation which prefigured the next phase in the drone's evolution.

Moving into the 1950s, the US did continue producing a number of target drones, but when it came to the subject of pilotless aircraft, their energies were mostly dedicated to guided missiles like the V-1 and the V-2.

Because for things like reconnaissance and surveillance, they had the state-of-the-art U-2 spy plane.

Trojan? Trojan.

There's been an alert at factories producing parts for V-1 and V-2 rockets to prepare for retooling.

They're going to

make the projector? It would seem so, sir.

I'll take 2,000 a month, but I don't like the name.

Let's call it a Vengeance Weapon 2." And that reflects his creativity because he'd already had a Vengeance Weapon 1, so now it's the Vengeance Weapon 2, which they nicknamed the V-2.

And Wernher was like, "Okay, love the name.

That's so amazing, but it's definitely not ready yet.

Okay.

Well, let's rebuild our rocket facility, but this time around let's do it in an underground hellscape staffed by starving slave laborers." And that's what they did.

Production of the A-4/V-2 moved to an underground facility called Mittelwerk, which was part of the Dora concentration camp.

And Wernher was not part of the decision-making process there.