V2 Rocket
German Army rocket programme, Peenemunde · 1945
A fourteen metre rocket painted in black and white checks rises through the Making the Modern World gallery, its tail fins near the floor and its nose close to the ceiling. This is a V2, the world's first long range ballistic missile, developed by the German army at Peenemunde under Wernher von Braun and fired at London, Antwerp and other cities from September 1944. Each one carried a tonne of explosive, climbed to the edge of space and came down faster than sound, so there was no warning. About three thousand were launched and they killed several thousand civilians, and far more people died building them in slave labour factories.
Look at the size of the engine at the base. The rocket burned alcohol and liquid oxygen, pumped by a turbine driven with hydrogen peroxide, and produced about twenty five tonnes of thrust for a minute of flight. Guidance came from gyroscopes and a time switch that tilted the missile onto its trajectory; graphite vanes in the exhaust steered it. This example was assembled from components captured by the British army in 1945 and tested at Cuxhaven. The chequered paint scheme was used on test rounds so that cameras could track them.
After the war the same technology, and many of the same engineers, went to the United States and the Soviet Union, and the V2's descendants launched the first satellites and the first astronauts. The rocket stands here as both a weapon and an ancestor of the spacecraft in the museum's Space gallery. Its presence in a gallery about the modern world is deliberate: it is one of the objects that made that world. A memorable detail is that the first V2 to hit London, on 8 September 1944, fell on Chiswick, only a few miles from where the rocket now stands.
Did You Know? The first V2 to hit London fell on Chiswick in September 1944, less than ten kilometres from where this one now stands.
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