The rocket that opened the space age never reached space

On 3 October 1942, a rocket lifted off Test Stand VII at Peenemünde and climbed 84.5 kilometres. It was the fourth flight of the A-4, the first that worked. Walter Dornberger, who ran the program, told the room: “This third day of October, 1942, is the first of a new era in transportation, that of space travel.”

That line is quoted every 3 October, and it has a problem underneath. 84.5 km is 52.5 miles: above the old American 50-mile edge of space, below the 100 km Kármán line the world settled on later. By today’s definition the first object to reach space is a different V-2, MW 18014, launched straight up on 20 June 1944. Wikipedia says the V-2 got the title “retroactively.” The anniversary is marked under a line that did not exist yet, and it sits under the line that does.

The rest is what the thing was for. Dornberger called it transportation; it was Aggregat 4, built to throw a one-tonne warhead at a city, and bad at hitting one. Three earlier flights had failed. When it went to war in September 1944 the scatter was wide enough that crews stopped aiming at points and aimed at cities. In London it killed 2,754 civilians, about two people per rocket, and the Germans thought the return poor.

Then the number that never makes the anniversary. A 2011 BBC documentary put V-2 attack deaths at about 9,000, soldiers and civilians. The same account put the deaths of the forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners who built the rockets at 12,000. More people died making the V-2 than died under it. The machine that opened the space age killed more of the people who assembled it than the cities it was fired at.

Dornberger’s sentence comes from his own account, written after the war. The line of space he was racing toward was drawn fifteen years later, by an engineer who had to put it somewhere.

Sources: Wikipedia’s “V-2 rocket” article and the histories it cites; Dornberger’s account of the 3 October 1942 launch; the 2011 BBC documentary for the casualty figures.