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The V-2 (German: Vergeltungswaffe 2, “Retribution Weapon 2“), technical name Aggregat 4 (A4), was the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile. The missile with a liquid-propellant rocket engine was developed during the Second World War in Germany as a “vengeance weapon“, assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings against German cities. The V-2 rocket also became the first artificial object to travel into outer space by crossing the Kármán line with the vertical launch of MW 18014 on 20 June 1944. Research into military use of long range rockets began when the studies of graduate student Wernher von Braun attracted the attention of the German Army. A series of prototypes culminated in the A-4, which went to war as the V-2. 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. According to a 2011 BBC documentary, the attacks from V2s 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. As Germany collapsed, teams from the Allied forces—the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union—raced to capture key German manufacturing sites and technology. Wernher von Braun and over 100 key V-2 personnel surrendered to the Americans. Eventually, many of the original V-2 team ended up working at the Redstone Arsenal. The US also captured enough V-2 hardware to build approximately 80 of the missiles. 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. Operation Osoaviakhim was a Soviet operation which took place on 22 October 1946, with NKVD and Soviet army units forcibly (at gunpoint) recruiting more than 2,000 German technical specialists and scientists from the Soviet occupation zone of post-World War II Germany for employment in the Soviet Union. Much related equipment was moved too, the aim being to literally transplant research and production centres, such as the relocated V-2 rocket centre at Mittelwerk Nordhausen, from Germany to the Soviet Union, and collect as much material as possible from test centres such as the Luftwaffe's central military aviation test centre at Erprobungstelle Rechlin, taken by the Red Army on 2 May 1945. The codename “Osoaviakhim“ was the acronym of a Soviet paramilitary organisation, later renamed DOSAAF. Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun (March 23, 1912 – June 16, 1977) was a German, later American, aerospace engineer and space architect credited with inventing the V-2 rocket for Germany and the Saturn V for the United States. He was the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in Germany and the father of rocket technology and space science in the United States. Following World War II, he was secretly moved to the United States, along with about 1,600 other scientists, engineers, and technicians, as part of Operation Paperclip, where he developed the rockets that launched the United States' first space satellite Explorer 1, and the Apollo program manned lunar landings. In his twenties and early thirties, von Braun worked in Germany's rocket development program, where he helped design and develop the V-2 rocket at Peenemünde during World War II. Following the war, von Braun worked for the United States Army on an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) program before his group was assimilated into NASA. Under NASA, he served as director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center and as the chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle, the superbooster that propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Moon. In 1975, he received the National Medal of Science. He continued insisting on the human mission to Mars throughout his life.
