MW 18014

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 20th of June 1944, MW 18014 lifted off from the Peenemünde Army Research Center. It climbed to an altitude of 176 kilometers, higher than any object built by human hands had gone before. It was never meant to reach orbital velocity. Instead it arced back down and struck the earth, making its short trip the first sub-orbital spaceflight on record. That same climb also carried it past the Kármán line, the boundary that would later mark where the sky ends and space begins. That makes MW 18014 the first human-made object to reach outer space. But the rocket that pulled off this climb had a troubled past. What had gone wrong with the A-4 rocket program in the years leading up to that June morning? And why would a later launch go on to erase MW 18014's own altitude record?

• 2. A Program In Crisis

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  Ninety kilometers was the ceiling of the early A-4 rockets that came before MW 18014, and even that height came at a cost. A design fault in the forward part of the outer hull caused the rocket to fail in mid-flight on a regular basis. As many as 70 percent of test launches ended in failure. On one occasion, an A-4 suffering from pogo oscillations veered 90 degrees off its course during ascent. It then spiraled back down into its own launch pit, killing four launch troops on the site.

  Fixing these problems became the task of the Peenemünde rocket team. Through 1943 and into the first half of 1944, they introduced a string of design changes. Allied raids carried out under Operation Hydra disrupted the effort. Attempts to privatize the program in June 1944 threatened to pull it apart from a different direction, while the SS interfered in its operations. On the 15th of March 1944, technical director Wernher von Braun was detained for two weeks, stalling the work further still. Allied advances through Northern France put fresh pressure on the program. So did improvements to the underground Mittelwerk facility, where the A-4 was built, and to the liquid-propellant formula that powered it. Together, they pushed von Braun to finally solve the rocket's reliability problems. That pressure led directly into a fresh series of vertical test launches conducted that June, meant to see how the rocket handled a vacuum.

• 3. An Unnoticed Milestone

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  One predecessor in that test program had set the previous altitude record on the 3rd of October 1942, a mark MW 18014's June flight broke. That new record would later be measured against a boundary drawn at 100 kilometers, the Kármán line. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, known as the World Air Sports Federation, established that boundary only after the war. At the time, though, the crossing barely registered as news among the people who achieved it. The Peenemünde team's attention instead went to V-4, a test launched in October 1942 that was the first of their rockets to reach the thermosphere. MW 18014 would not hold its new altitude record for long.

• 4. The Record Falls

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  189 kilometers was the apogee reached by a later A-4, also known as a V-2, when it broke MW 18014's altitude record. That launch flew as part of the same June test series, but nobody wrote down the date it happened. Rocket scientists at Peenemünde were not recording precise dates during that phase of the program. So the flight that overtook MW 18014 has no place on the calendar. The rocket that broke MW 18014's record flew and disappeared from the calendar in the same stroke. It left a small gap in a program that otherwise tracked its every launch.