12/23/2023 0 Comments Whats a v2 rocket vanguard![]() “The V2 programme was hugely expensive in terms of lives, with the Nazis using slave labour to manufacture these rockets.” “It’s something that’s often glossed over, but shouldn’t be,” says Doug Millard, space historian and curator of space technology at London’s Science Museum, where a V2 takes pride of place in the main exhibition hall. However, a far grimmer statistic is that many more, at least 20,000, died constructing the V2s themselves. More than 1,300 V2s were fired at England and, as allied forces advanced, hundreds more were targeted at Belgium and France.Īlthough there is no exact figure, estimates suggest that several thousand people were killed by the missile – 2,724 in Britain alone. “It was a terror weapon, you didn’t hear it arriving, it was just there… bang!” “Suddenly there was a large bang in a road nearby and a great cloud of debris was thrown up in the air, and that was a V2 rocket,” he says. Having seen a rocket launch, Dad was fortunate enough to escape a V2’s return to Earth when he was waiting for another train at Queen’s Park underground station in north London. V stood for ‘vergeltungswaffen', or 'retaliatory weapon', and were a last-ditch attempt by the Germans to reverse the course of the war. It took just five minutes from launch to landing. “Whenever you have a team of people working towards a common objective – whether that’s a team of 10 in a small business or tens of thousands with project Apollo to go to the Moon – you’ve got to have someone who keeps it all on track, who has that big vision,” says Johnson.However, unlike aircraft or the V2’s predecessor the V1 flying bomb, this was a new type of weapon, crashing and exploding without warning in target cities, such as London, Norwich, Paris, Lille and Antwerp. ![]() Johnson believes that as well as von Braun’s visionary concepts we should also admire his leadership. Johnson’s office has recently been grappling with the challenges of building the new Space Launch System (SLS) – the first rocket since von Braun’s Saturn 5 capable of taking humans beyond low-Earth orbit and, potentially back to the Moon and onto Mars. “If I was to compare it to what we do today, most of the issues we’re wrestling with were things he outlined in 1964.” “I have a conference report from 1964 looking beyond the Moon – and this was before even Project Gemini – and he was already telling his folks to start planning that Mars trip,” says Johnson. “Our charter is to continue what he began – it is a direct linear descendent of what he did.” “Von Braun started this office back in the 1960s,” says Les Johnson, technical advisor for advanced concepts at Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and owner of a DVD copy of the original Disney series. “At the end of the 60s, the Space Task Group tried to recommend to Nixon that we need to build a space shuttle and a space station and then we’ll prepare for expeditions back to the Moon and onto Mars.” “Nasa kept trying to come back to the script,” says Neufeld. ![]() But, in the minds of some in the American space agency, this was just a diversion. Throughout the 1960s, von Braun pursued the development of the giant Saturn 5 rocket that would take men to the Moon. “When going straight to the Moon became the project he was enthused by that and didn’t necessarily adhere to this rigid shuttle, Moon, Mars scheme but for a lot of engineers at Nasa that was the logical programme for human space exploration.” “The plan was very influential in the 60s and it lived on,” Neufeld says. “He was obsessed with the Moon, that was his childhood ambition.” ![]() “What he was trying to do was lay out an architecture for how spaceflight might be possible,” explains Michael Neufeld, senior curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC and author of three books and numerous articles on von Braun. ![]()
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