
If you'd asked me before very recently which country was the first to get into outer space, and when, I'd've said, "Russia, 1957, duh." And been totally wrong. Sputnik was the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth, but it was by no means the first man-made thing to leave the atmosphere. The decade prior to 1957 saw all kinds of suborbital flights cross the 100-km-high boundary between air and space (the Kármán line) as both America and Russia worked up their ICBM arsenals. Both superpowers relied heavily on rocket technology looted from the Germans at the end of World War Two. America began test-firing captured V2 rockets in New Mexico in April 1946, and put a monkey into space in 1949. The Russians were getting into space with their R-1 version of the V2 by 1951. But did the Germans themselves put a V2 into space? Five times, apparently, between June and December 1944, from their launch site at Peenemuende. One rocket reached a height of 189 km, a little more than half the distance to the International Space Station today. The V2 was such a sturdy design that one of the groups vying for the 2004 X Prize, Canadian Arrow, showed up with a version of it. Douglas (image from Fritz Lang's 1929 film Frau im Mond)