The task before Goddard was daunting, but he believed that the potential benefit was worth the difficulty and risk.
On March 16, 1926, after a long string of failed attempts, Robert Goddard managed to successfully launch a liquid fuel rocket. Powered by gasoline and liquid oxygen, his rocket flew for about two and a half seconds, reaching an altitude of 41 feet before landing in a cabbage patch about 180 feet from the launch pad.
By current standards, it was not much of a flight. It didn’t even approach the performance of the least successful solid fuel rockets in history. But a liquid fuel rocket had flown. Like the Wright Brothers, with their first faltering airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, Robert Goddard had proven that his strange machine could fly.
While Goddard was still struggling to get a liquid fuel rocket into the air, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, another great rocket pioneer was making his own mark upon the face of history. In 1922, a German/Romanian physicist named Hermann Oberth submitted a 92-page doctoral dissertation on rocket science. His dissertation was rejected as ‘utopian,’ and his doctoral degree was withheld.
Oberth responded by publishing his dissertation in 1923, under the title ‘Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen’ (“By Rocket into Planetary Space”). Oberth went on to expand the work to 429 pages, re-publishing it as ‘Wege zur Raumschiffahrt’ (“Ways to Spaceflight”) in 1929.
Oberth’s writings inspired scientifically-minded people of many nations. Rocket clubs and associations began springing up all over the world.
Of particular note was a German rocket association, called ‘Verein fur Raumschiffahrt,’ the Society for Space Travel. The club’s membership included Wernher von Braun, Hermann Oberth, and Arthur Rudolph, and many others who would go on to play major roles in the field of rocket science.
After purchasing a plot of land near the city of Berlin, the club members built a ‘Raketenflugplatz’ (rocket airfield), and began launching rockets of their own design. The earliest of these, the Mirak series, were largely failures. But the club’s Repulsor series was highly-successful. Some of the Repulsor rockets reached altitudes of over 3,000 feet.
In 1932, the club approached the German army for funding. Club officers arranged a demonstration launch for the army. The rocket failed, but Captain Walter Dornberger — who was in charge of the German army’s rocket program — was impressed with the knowledge, skill, and dedication of the club members. He offered to fund the club’s experiments if the members would agree to operate under conditions of secrecy, and focus their efforts toward developing military rockets.
Some of the members voted to accept Dornberger’s offer, and others voted to reject it. The ensuing argument, coupled with a continued lack of funding, caused the club to dissolve in 1933. Even so, the impact of Verein fur Raumschiffahrt was far from over.
Following the death of German President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Chancellor Adolf Hitler combined his office with the office of President, and declared himself to be the Führer. Under his command, the National Socialist German Workers Party (better known to history as the Nazi Party) began a massive campaign to build up the German military. Hitler’s goal was nothing less than the conquest of Europe, and — ultimately — the subjugation of every nation on earth.
To achieve the Führer’s objectives, the German military began a number of aggressive research programs, all aimed at creating the kind of super-weapons needed to conquer an entire planet. Among these secret projects was the German rocket program, and several members of the Verein fur Raumschiffahrt rocket club, including Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, were seduced or coerced into joining the Nazi quest to build super rockets.
One of the most successful developments of the Nazi rocket program was the Vergeltungswaffe 1, or V-1 rocket. Also known as the buzz bomb or doodlebug, the V-1 was powered by a pulse jet engine, and guided by a gyro-magnetic autopilot system. The first test flights occurred in late 1941 or early 1942. After some initial guidance problems were ironed out, the V-1 proved to be an incredibly powerful weapon. Many military historians classify it as the first cruise missile.
By 1944, Germany was launching V-1 rockets at England, literally by the thousands. According to a report written by American General Clayton Bissell in December of 1944, about 8,025 self-guided V-1 rockets were launched at targets in England during a nine-week period of that year. As a result of this unrelenting barrage of rockets, more than a million houses and other buildings were destroyed or damaged, and tens of thousands of people were killed.
The rocket, which had been a formidable engine of war almost from the outset, was becoming the first weapon of mass destruction.
The V-2 rocket program (Vergeltungswaffe 2) ran concurrently with the V-1 project, but the V-2s were much more technologically advanced. Under the engineering expertise of Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, the V-2 rocket became the first true ballistic missile, and the first man-made object to reach sub-orbital space.
After climbing to the fringes of outer space, a V-2 rocket would tip over and drop back down into the atmosphere, diving toward its target at four times the speed of sound with a 2,150 pound warhead of highly-explosive Amatol. The combination of extreme altitude and supersonic speed made the rockets invulnerable to anti-aircraft guns and fighter planes, and the enormous warheads made the rockets exceptionally powerful. A single V-2 rocket could reduce an entire city block to ankle-high rubble.
In terms of technological achievement, the V-2 was a quantum leap forward. In terms of tactical effectiveness, it was somewhat less impressive. Despite its speed, range, and warhead capacity, the V-2 was not very accurate. Also, the V-2 became operational too late in the war to have much impact on the outcome of the fighting. Of the more than 6,000 V-2 rockets built, only about half were ever launched as weapons. The remainder were destroyed, expended by testing, or captured by the Allies at the end of World War II.
The war in Europe came to an end on May 7, 1945, when Generaloberst Alfred Jodl signed the documents of unconditional surrender on behalf of the German High Command. Adolf Hitler lay dead by his own hand, and his beloved Berlin was in flames. Hitler’s dream of world domination had fallen to ashes, along with much of his erstwhile Nazi empire.
Hitler’s super rockets had come too late to turn the tide of the war, but no one could deny that the V-1 and V-2 really were the super rockets that he had threatened to build.
On the other side of the world, the war in the Pacific was entering its bloodiest phase. The defeat of Imperial Japan was considered a certainty, but the Japanese were preparing to fight to the very last man, woman, or child. Japan would not surrender.
But everything changed in August of 1945. On the sixth day of that month, an American B-29 bomber obliterated the Japanese city of Hiroshima with a single atomic bomb. More than 70,000 people were killed instantly, and nearly a quarter of a million more would die from the effects of nuclear radiation over the next few years.
Three days after the destruction of Hiroshima, while Japan was still reeling from the shock of losing an entire city to a single bomb, America followed up with a second nuclear attack on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Once again, a single atomic bomb was used, and once again the devastation was complete. Somewhere between 40,000 and 75,000 people were killed by the direct effects of the explosion. And — as with Hiroshima — tens of thousands more would die over the following years.