Until Now
TechnologyConflictExploration

Rockets

Goddard flies a liquid-fuelled rocket, and the V-2 reaches space.

When
Duration
18 years
Known to
± 1 year
Era
Industrial, Holocene

Goddard launches the first liquid-fuelled rocket in 1926, rising 12 metres. Tsiolkovsky had already worked out the mathematics of staged flight. The German V-2, first used against Britain in 1944, is the first object to cross the boundary of space, and it kills more people building it in the Mittelbau-Dora camp than it does landing on cities. Its engineers and hardware are taken by both the United States and the Soviet Union.

Just before

Just after