Attention, readiness for a minute!
The key to start!
There is a key to start!
Broach one!
There is a broach one!
Purge!
There is a purge!
Drainage key!
There is a drainage key!
Ignition!
Understood you, the ignition is given.
Preliminary!
There is a preliminary one!
Intermediate!
Home!
Rise!
35 seconds, normal flight. Height 19 kilometers. Overboard temperature - 55 ° С. Here water boils at the temperature of a human body, and stars are visible in the blue-black sky during the day.
60 seconds, the flight is normal. Height is 32 kilometers. In the minute that has passed since the launch, the V-2 rocket reached a speed of about 1600 m / s (about 6 thousand km / h).
At this moment, observers on Earth see how the second stage, called "VAK-Corporeal", separated, and, sharply increasing its speed, went to assault the maximum altitude.
100 seconds, the flight is normal. The VAK-Korporal rocket reached an altitude of 110 km. Passed the "Karman line", which defines the border between astronautics and aeronautics: at this altitude, all the laws of aerodynamics become meaningless, because to create lift, it will be necessary to exceed the first space velocity (7, 9 km / s).
145 seconds, normal flight. Height is 160 kilometers. Overboard temperature + 1500 ° С. But the ultra-low air pressure, close to vacuum, makes the very concept of temperature meaningless - here it only indicates a very high speed of movement of air molecules. A person, finding himself in the thermosphere without a spacesuit, will only feel the icy coldness of outer space.
150 seconds from the start. The first stage, the V-2 rocket, reached an altitude of 161 km and crashed down into the abyss of the earth's atmosphere … At this time, VAK-Korporal flies into Space at a speed of 2.5 km / s.
200 seconds, the flight is normal. An altitude of 250 km was reached. The boundary of the lowest possible orbit with short-term stability. An artificial satellite of the Earth can exist here for several weeks.
300 seconds from the start. The V-2 rocket crashed in the desert 36 kilometers north of the launch site. At this time, "VAK-Korporal" continues to rise to the stars.
390 seconds, normal flight. The second stage reached a height of 402 kilometers. At this altitude, the vacuum is so deep that it cannot be achieved even in the most modern laboratories in terrestrial conditions. Thus, the VAK-Korporal rocket reached airless space.
12 minutes, end of flight. The VAK-Korporal rocket crashed on the earth's surface. Despite the fact that the radars accurately determined the area of the fall of the second stage, its remains were found only a year later, 135 kilometers from the launch site.
So, on February 24, 1949, the American space rocket system "Bumper" opened the way to the Stars for Mankind. The reader probably smiled after reading this phrase - after all, everyone knows that the first space satellite was launched in the Soviet Union. On October 4, 1957, the R-7 ballistic missile, the legendary "Royal Seven", carried a steel ball 58 centimeters in diameter into the night sky of Baikonur, which became a symbol of the beginning of the Space Age. Humanity has defeated the gravity of the Earth.
Chasing a sensation
Legends about the space program of the Third Reich and secret fascist bases on the Moon still do not leave the pages of the "yellow press". Indeed, who was the first to enter outer space? German "astronaut" Kurt Keller, who claims to have made a suborbital flight in the "V-2" back in 1944? Or maybe the first in space was Dr. Zenger's fantastic rocket plane? After all, is the team of American researchers worthy of the palm when they launched a rocket at an altitude of 400 kilometers in 1949?
It depends on what is meant by "launching into space". If this is a normal suborbital flight along a parabolic trajectory, then, undoubtedly, the first were the Germans - even during the Second World War, 4,300 V-2 ballistic missiles fell on London!
Here the question immediately arises: where is the boundary of the earth's atmosphere and where does the Cosmos begin? For example, the United States officially draws an airspace boundary at an altitude of 50 miles (80 km). Russia calls the figure 100 kilometers. The end of the heated debate was brought by Theodor von Karman, proposing, in my opinion, an ingenious solution - Space begins where the first space velocity is required to create a minimum aerodynamic lift. This happens exactly at an altitude of about 100 kilometers. The top of the flight path of the V-2 ballistic missile exceeded 100 km, in other words, the German rocket was the first to enter outer space. Let it only be for a few seconds.
And what, then, is the meaning of the achievement of the American rocket scientists, who raised the container with scientific equipment to an altitude of 400 kilometers above the Earth? After all, this is an ordinary suborbital flight, which differs from the flights of V-2 only in a higher trajectory - VAK-Corporeal climbed to the place where the ISS is currently surfacing (which, of course, is impressive - after all, it was 1949 year). The only important advantage of the Bumper project (a wild symbiosis of the captured V-2 and the American meteorological rocket) is the two-stage design, which has made it possible to multiply the maximum lift of the rocket. Nevertheless, when the humorous question sounds: "Who was the first in space?" American astronautics often cite the VAK-Korporal flight as an example.
Probably it is not necessary to tell for a long time in which country the first artificial Earth satellite was created and who was the first cosmonaut. The principal difference between Sputnik-1 and VAK-Korporal was the elliptical flight path of the Soviet spacecraft.
As for the level of their technological performance, the two-stage "Bumper" and the R-7 launch vehicle differed in the same way as the Chinese firecracker and the Hellfire guided missile. By the end of the 40s, the great-grandmother of all modern V-2 missiles was already a largely outdated project, with a bunch of flaws and unsatisfactory characteristics. Due to the lack of the necessary knowledge and technologies at that time, American specialists did not manage to ensure effective separation of the rocket stages. From the point of view of logic, the separation of the first stage should take place at the moment when the fuel in its tanks is completely consumed, alas, this was impossible on the Bumper, because the acceleration of the V-2 in the last seconds of its engine operation exceeded the initial acceleration that VAK-Korporal could develop. Many questions arose with the automatic start of the second stage engine at an altitude of 30 kilometers - the propellant components burned perfectly in ground conditions, but in a rarefied atmosphere they instantly evaporated and mixed, which led to a premature explosion in the fuel lines and the destruction of the rocket. Many problems arose with the stabilization of the rocket on the upper segment of the trajectory - all aerodynamic surfaces were useless in a vacuum. It would be a stretch to call VAK-Korporal a space system - according to none of the criteria, it does not fit this title.
In a word, the truth remains firm - the primacy in the space race belongs to the USSR.
First images of the Earth taken from near space:
