Posted on October 3, 2022
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Par Louis Anders.
The place is overgrown with vegetation and the tall pines typical of the region. A few reinforced concrete walls remain, and we can distinguish between the trees like walls of earth that surrounded a delimited area. In this space where wild nature is irresistibly reclaiming its rights, it is hard to believe that one of Man’s most impressive technological achievements took place: on October 3, 1942, engineers sent there for the first time a machine designed with their hands beyond the earth’s atmosphere and thus reached the gates of the cosmos.
We are on the peninsula of Usedom, in the northeast of Germany, by the Baltic Sea. The region is popular with Germans for its high forests and beautiful white sand beaches. Not far away is the island of Rügen, a popular spot for local artists, and further north, 200 kilometers away, the island where the famous Danish astronomer Tycho Brahé made fundamental observations for understanding the solar system. Northeastern Germany is also known for having hosted one of the largest research and testing centers in the world, the Peenmünde site. Between 1937 and 1944, Peenemünde was used by the German army and air force to develop the most futuristic machines there: rockets, jet planes, guided missiles… It concentrated thousands of engineers and technicians, employed by the army or by German industrial enterprises.
” TO Peenemünde, they brought together all the skillsexplains our guide, Mr. Rheiner, an enthusiast who, with a friend, is trying to bring the vast site to life. At the test center, more than 4,000 people arrived in the morning and left in the evening, in particular by means of a revolutionary electric train, the fastest at the time. ».
The great pioneers, from the Urals to the Atlantic
It was here that the first rocket in history was developed, the A4, which would later be called V2. First intended for military use in the context of war, then used as the foundation for the first ballistic missiles, it was mainly used to imagine the future launchers which, in Soviet Russia and the United States, would make it possible to send satellites and people around the Earth.
A technological prodigy, the rocket designed by the German engineers immediately incorporated all the main principles that will allow Man to leave his native land and see what the other planets look like: use of lightweight materials resistant to supersonic engines, integration of gyroscopes for autonomous guidance, miniaturization of radio transmitters and receivers, design of liquid oxygen engines and tanks maintaining the fuel at a temperature of -180 C°, or installation of sensors to check the state live material, and invention of launch procedures with countdown.
In a book published in 1954, the former head of the German rocket development program, Walter Dornberger, who following the war imagined the plans behind the famous American X15 aircraft, recounts the years of technical and administrative difficulties for achieve initial success. It also shows the enthusiasm and creativity of this young generation of engineers, many of whom would be the pillars of the Apollo missions to the Moon in the 1960s.
The dream of interplanetary travel
As often in the history of technology, it was state and military needs that made the advent of the stratospheric rocket possible. Indeed, it was to circumvent the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles on long-range artillery that the German army made investments in alternative devices from 1932. But the development of the first rocket in history n would never have seen the light of day without the astonishing momentum that reigned on the subject in Europe and the West.
From the beginning of the century, a Russian inventor influenced by the stories of Jules Verne, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, began to study the means that might allow Man to tear himself away from the earth’s gravity. It will not be the hot-air balloon, which relies on the air, nor the airplane just born and operating on the same principle, but the rocket. His mathematical calculations made him discover that putting into orbit or an interplanetary flight depended on an essential factor: the speed of the rocket. For the craft to leave Earth, it was necessary to equip it with several separable stages, and to use only a certain type of special fuels which he listed.
Independently, the French Robert Esnault-Pelterie or the American Robert Goddard had also studied the question around 1910, imagining or creating instruments to allow rockets to reach the upper atmosphere. Then came a German from Transylvania, Hermann Oberth, considered one of the fathers of astronautics: he took note of these works, added his own analyses, and published in 1923 Rockets to interplanetary spaces, a book that unleashed the passions of many young Germans. Written in balanced terms and always accompanied by figures relating to a practical realization, the work asserted that, in the context of science and technology of the time, it was possible to build machines rising beyond of the atmosphere, that such machines might transport men without risk of damage to their health, and that they might even become commercially profitable in the long term. But from the printed ink to the realization, there is a world…
Technological prowess
In 1927, Hermann Oberth and other somewhat dreamy scientists founded a “Society for Space Travel” in Germany. This one edited a serious review, The rocket, where there was a bubbling of ideas: some wanted to create rockets for postal transport, others supersonic planes, still others spacecraft to visit other planets. The first achievements were not long in appearing, such as a car propelled by mini-rockets, a prototype of a jet-cooled engine, or even flights of (very small) liquid-fuel rockets. But capital was lacking; indeed, most industrialists and academics did not consider it useful to follow up on projects as embryonic as they were futuristic.
It is within this disorderly breeding ground of brilliant engineers that a section of the German army will recruit its first thinking heads.
Walter Dornberger would later write:
« We were tired of imaginary space travel projects. The sixth decimal of the calculation of the curve of the trajectory between the Earth and Venus left us as indifferent as the problems of heating and ventilation of the Earth-Mars spacecraft. What we wanted was to move forward, to experiment. We needed combustion chamber performance diagrams. We wanted to know how much the machines consumed per second, what was the most efficient mixture of fuels, how to solve the problems posed by heating, what shape to give to the injectors, the combustion chamber and the nozzle… ».
And this was only a small part of the totally new problems that the researchers had to solve.
« I had great difficulty, at the beginning, in ridding my young collaborators of their illusions relative to interplanetary travel and in forcing them to devote themselves to a methodical work of research and improvement. ».
However, in 1942, following ten years of development and often failed tests, its teams sent the first artificial machine to the gates of the cosmos.
After this feat, the research program whetted the appetite of German industry and the SS organization, both of which would attempt to take control of it. It also began to alarm the Allied powers, who undertook a massive bombardment of Peenemünde in August 1943, killing nearly 800 people. Others will follow, which will cause the gradual relocation of flight tests.
Even today, Peenemünde retains the traces of the war.
« There are still unexploded bombs in the groundsays our guide, pointing to a vast patch of forest with no access. No one cared regarding it; one million euros would be needed to clear everything ».
And in the main lake of the site still lies the nose of an English bomber shot down by the anti-aircraft defense.
Artemis, a hundred years following the first sketches
The military career of the V2 rocket was short: the first to be used as weapons were fired in September 1944 once morest the port of Antwerp and the city of London, and the last in March 1945. At the end of the war, the launcher will be used in particular to study the Earth’s upper atmosphere, allowing fundamental advances in the understanding of the gaseous envelope that surrounds our planet. Then the space race between the Soviet and American empires gave birth to satellite communication, space surveillance, and above all the first interplanetary probes.
After being preempted by the Russians, the first to send a man and a multiple crew around the Earth, the Americans caught up with the German engineers of the V2, who had moved to the West following the war. Within the US space administration, they will imagine the means to go to the Moon. To make such a trip, they designed the Saturn 5, the tallest rocket in history (110 meters!), and they developed oxygen and liquid hydrogen engines for its upper stages, a very difficult technology to master which does not has still not been exceeded today. It is she that NASA has chosen to build the Space Launch System (SLS), its giant launcher which should allow a return to the Moon in 2025. The new Artemis missions are the cornerstones of a larger project, which provides the construction of a station in orbit around the lunar star, lunar explorations and possible trips to Mars. Exactly what the German rocket pioneers dreamed of nearly a century ago…
