V-2
1942-1945
The first human-made object to cross the Kármán line, and the first ballistic missile ever used in war - the same machine, on both counts. A 12.5-ton liquid-fuel rocket that arrived faster than the sound of its own approach, so there was never any warning; developed by Nazi Germany and fired at London, Antwerp and other cities from September 1944.
Specs
Length 14 m; launch mass 12.5 t; ethanol and liquid-oxygen engine burning ~65 s to a 25-ton-thrust cutoff; apogee up to ~88 km as a weapon, 176 km on a 1944 test. Reached space before any nation had a space programme: MW 18014 passed 100 km on 20 June 1944 - retroactively the first artificial object in space. Inertial gyroscopes steered it; the engine cut off on target velocity, and the rest was gravity. It arrived faster than the sound of its own approach, so there was no warning.
Why it matters
This is the card the collection handles flatly, because the fact and the cost arrive together. V-2 attacks killed an estimated 9,000 people, and an estimated 12,000 - more than the weapon itself killed - died making them, as slave labourers at Mittelwerk in the Kohnstein tunnels; the production death toll exceeded the bombing death toll. Peenemünde was attacked by the RAF in August 1943 in one of the war's most consequential bombing raids. After the war the captured rockets were launched again, this time instrumented, from White Sands - carrying the first film cameras above 100 km in 1946 - while the engineers and the inertial-guidance architecture went into the Redstone, which put the first American in orbit. Rocketry's direct ancestry runs through here; so does the forced labour. Neither half is optional.