Germany's V-2 rocket reached space on its first successful flight

On October 3, 1942, after two earlier failures, German engineers at Peenemünde launched the fourth test of the A-4 rocket—better known later as the V-2—and it worked. The slender ballistic missile climbed to about 85–90 kilometers and flew some 190 kilometers downrange.

That altitude fell just short of the Kármán line at 100 kilometers, the modern boundary of space, yet the flight is still widely credited as the first by a human-made object to reach space. General Walter Dornberger reportedly called the day the dawn of a new era in transportation: space travel.

The triumph was deeply double-edged. The same vehicle became the world’s first long-range ballistic missile, built with forced labor and fired at cities during the war’s final years.

The rocket that opened the road to the Moon was first designed as a weapon.

After 1945, captured V-2s and their designers seeded both the American and Soviet space programs, making this Baltic test stand an unlikely cradle of the Space Age.