MW 18014

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MW 18014
Phase : F / Status : finished
Type: Unit 4
Country: German Reich NSGerman Reich (Nazi era) German Empire
Organization: Wehrmacht
Mission dates
Start date: June 20, 1944
Starting place: Army research institute Peenemünde
End date: June 20, 1944
Orbit data
Track height: approx. 175 km ( suborbital )
General spacecraft data
Takeoff mass: 12,500 kg
Manufacturer: Mittelwerk GmbH
Others
Previous
mission:		 V-177
Subsequent
mission:		 MW 17940

MW 18014 was a German A4 rocket, the test launch of which was carried out on June 20, 1944 in the Peenemünde Army Research Center on Greifswalder Oie . It is considered to be the first man-made object in space , as it crossed the Kármán line , the internationally recognized boundary to space, at a height of around 175 km . However, it did not reach orbital velocity and therefore hit the earth again west of Zingst . Thus this vertical takeoff was the first suborbital flight . The name of the rocket is made up of MW for Mittelwerk , the manufacturer of the rocket, and its serial number.

background

Earlier A4 rockets could reach heights of 90 km, but were not very reliable. For example, up to 70% of the test starts failed because many missiles failed in mid-flight due to a design flaw in the front part of the fuselage. An A4 missile pogoed off course during the ascent and twisted back to its launch site, where it killed four members of the launch troops.

The team in Peenemünde then made some improvements in 1943 and in the first half of 1944 in order to increase the reliability of the rockets. Interferences by the SS , attacks by the Allies as part of Operation Hydra and attempts to privatize the program in June 1944 and the two-week arrest of technical director Wernher von Braun on March 15, 1944 made this difficult.

The advance of the Allies in Normandy , advances in the Mittelwerk underground factory where the rockets were manufactured, and improvements in liquid fuels increased expectations of von Braun to increase the reliability of the A4.

Broken records

The rocket launch was part of a series of vertical test launches in June 1944 to test the behavior of the rockets in a vacuum. With an apogee of 176 or 174.6 km, it broke the previous altitude record of 84.5 km set by the test launch V-4 on October 3, 1942. V-4 had been the first object to reach the thermosphere .

MW 18014 was the first man-made object to reach space as defined by the 100 km high Kármán line . At the time, however, the altitude was not considered special; the rocket scientists celebrated the launch of the V-4. After the war, the International Aeronautical Association (FAI) set the Kármán Line, the boundary between the earth's atmosphere and space, at 100 km.

A subsequent A4 rocket from the same test series later broke the record of MW 18014 with an altitude of 189 km. The date of this launch is unknown, however, as the scientists did not record any exact dates at that time.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ MP Milazzo, L. Kestay, C. Dundas; US Geological Survey: The Challenge for 2050: Cohesive Analysis of More Than One Hundred Years of Planetary Data . In: Planetary Science Division, NASA (ed.): Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop . 1989, 2017, p. 8070. bibcode : 2017LPICo1989.8070M . Retrieved June 7, 2019.
  2. ↑ Michael Bright, Chloe Sarosh: Earth from Space ( en ). Ebury Publishing, Introduction 2019, ISBN 978-1-4735-3160-4 (Retrieved June 7, 2019).
  3. ↑ a b c Mark Wade: Peenemuende . Archived from the original on April 25, 2005. Retrieved June 7, 2019.
  4. ↑ Matt Williams: How high is space? . September 16, 2016. Archived from the original on June 2, 2017. Retrieved on May 14, 2017.
  5. ^ André T. Hensel: History of space travel until 1970: From the race into space to the moon landing , 2nd edition, Springer Verlag , Berlin, ISBN 978-3-662-58838-3 , pp. 32 and 42
  6. ↑ a b c Chronology - Quarter 1 1944 . April 8, 2010. Retrieved June 7, 2019.
  7. ↑ Highlights in German Rocket Development from 1927–1945 . NASA Marshall Space Flight Center.
  8. ^ A b Walter Dornberger : V-2 . Viking, New York 1952. English translation 1954.