The world's first large-scale experimental rocket program was Opel-RAK under the leadership of Fritz von Opel and Max Valier, a collaborator of Oberth, during the late 1920s leading to the first manned rocket cars and rocket planes, which paved the way for the Nazi era V2 program and US and Soviet activities from 1950 onwards. In the late 1920s, a young Wernher von Braun bought a copy of Hermann Oberth's book, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen ( The Rocket into Interplanetary Spaces). Wind tunnel model of an A4 in the German Museum of Technology in Berlin The Soviets gained possession of the V-2 manufacturing facilities after the war, re-established V-2 production, and moved it to the Soviet Union. The US also captured enough V-2 hardware to build approximately 80 of the missiles. Von Braun and over 100 key V-2 personnel surrendered to the Americans, and many of the original V-2 team ended up working at the Redstone Arsenal. Teams from the Allied forces-the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union-raced to seize key German manufacturing facilities, procure Germany's missile technology, and capture the V-2’s launching sites. The rockets travelled at supersonic speed, impacted without audible warning, and proved unstoppable, as no effective defense existed. According to a 2011 BBC documentary, the attacks from V-2s resulted in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel, and a further 12,000 forced laborers and concentration camp prisoners died as a result of their forced participation in the production of the weapons. Beginning in September 1944, over 3,000 V-2s were launched by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets, first London and later Antwerp and Liège. A series of prototypes culminated in the A-4, which went to war as the V-2. Research into military use of long-range rockets began when the graduate studies of Wernher von Braun attracted the attention of the German Army. The V-2 rocket also became the first artificial object to travel into space by crossing the Kármán line with the vertical launch of MW 18014 on 20 June 1944. The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the Second World War in Germany as a " vengeance weapon" and assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings against German cities. The V-2 ( German: Vergeltungswaffe 2, lit.'Retaliation Weapon 2'), with the technical name Aggregat 4 ( A4), was the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile.
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