MW 18014 was a German A-4 test rocket launched on 20 June 1944, at the

Peenemünde Army Research Center The Peenemünde Army Research Center (german: Heeresversuchsanstalt Peenemünde, HVP) was founded in 1937 as one of five military proving grounds under the German Army Weapons Office (''Heereswaffenamt''). Several German guided missiles an ...

Peenemünde Peenemünde (, en, " Peene iverMouth") is a municipality on the Baltic Sea island of Usedom in the Vorpommern-Greifswald district in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. It is part of the ''Amt'' (collective municipality) of Usedom-Nord. The commu ...

. It was the first man-made object to reach

outer space Outer space, commonly shortened to space, is the expanse that exists beyond Earth and its atmosphere and between celestial bodies. Outer space is not completely empty—it is a near-perfect vacuum containing a low density of particles, pred ...

, attaining an

apogee An apsis (; ) is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body. For example, the apsides of the Earth are called the aphelion and perihelion. General description There are two apsides in any el ...

of 176 kilometers (109.3 miles), which is well above the

Kármán line The Kármán line (or von Kármán line ) is an attempt to define a boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space, and offers a specific definition set by the Fédération aéronautique internationale (FAI), an international record-keeping ...

. It was a vertical test launch. Although the rocket reached space, it did not reach orbital velocity, and therefore returned to Earth in an impact, becoming the first

sub-orbital spaceflight A sub-orbital spaceflight is a spaceflight in which the spacecraft reaches outer space, but its trajectory intersects the atmosphere or surface of the gravitating body from which it was launched, so that it will not complete one orbital re ...

Background

Early A-4 rockets, despite being able to reach altitudes of 90 km, had suffered from multiple reliability issues. For example, a design fault in the forward part of the outer hull caused it to regularly fail mid-flight, resulting in the failure of up to 70% of test launches. On one occasion, an A-4 rocket suffering from pogo oscillations during ascent veered 90 degrees off course then spiralled back down to its launch pit, killing four launch troops on site. The Peenemünde rocket team made a number of improvements to rectify the reliability issues during 1943 and the first half of 1944. Hindering the program were constant interference from the SS, Allied raids as part of Operation Hydra, attempts to privatise the program in June 1944, and a two-week detention of technical director

Wernher von Braun Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun ( , ; 23 March 191216 June 1977) was a German and American aerospace engineer and space architect. He was a member of the Nazi Party and Allgemeine SS, as well as the leading figure in the develop ...

on 15 March 1944. Allied advances in Northern France and improvements to the Mittelwerk underground facility, where the A-4 rockets were produced, and improvements to the liquid propellant formula placed renewed emphasis on Von Braun to address the A-4's reliability issues.

Records broken

MW 18014 was part of a series of vertical test launches made in June 1944 designed to gauge the rocket's behaviour in vacuum. MW 18014 broke the altitude record set by one of its predecessors (launched on 3 October 1942 English translation 1954.) to attain an apogee of 176 km. MW 18014 was the first man-made object to cross into outer space, as defined by the 100 km

. This particular altitude was not considered significant at the time; the Peenemünde rocket scientists rather celebrated test launch V-4 in October 1942, first to reach the

thermosphere The thermosphere is the layer in the Earth's atmosphere directly above the mesosphere and below the exosphere. Within this layer of the atmosphere, ultraviolet radiation causes photoionization/photodissociation of molecules, creating ions; the ...

. After the war, the

World Air Sports Federation In its most general sense, the term "world" refers to the totality of entities, to the whole of reality or to everything that is. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the worl ...

(FAI) defined the boundary between

Earth's atmosphere The atmosphere of Earth is the layer of gases, known collectively as air, retained by Earth's gravity that surrounds the planet and forms its planetary atmosphere. The atmosphere of Earth protects life on Earth by creating pressure allowing fo ...

and

to be the Kármán line. A subsequent A-4/V-2 launched as part of the same series of tests would break MW 18014's record, with an apogee of 189 km. The date of that launch is unknown because rocket scientists did not record precise dates during this phase.

Notes

References

{{Portal, Spaceflight, Germany, Politics Spacecraft launched in 1944 1944 in Germany V-weapons Wernher von Braun Space programme of Germany Short-range ballistic missiles Spaceflight before 1951

Background

Records broken

Notes

See also

References