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You know how the Soviets were the first to put a human into space? Well it was the fucking Nazis who were the first to put a thing into space, 17 years previous. And after the war the Americans were all hey those are some cool fuckin’ rockets you made, never mind those war crimes you committed come work for us.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: June 20, 1944--
Where is “space”? There is no international law saying where a nation’s airspace ends and space space begins. NASA and the US Air Force say 50 miles above sea level because fuck that “base 10 metric” bullshit we like our units of measurement to be all over the fucking place. Alternatively, there is the Kármán line, which says space starts 100 km up. That’s 62 miles to you imperialists. Anyway, June 20, 1944, was when a manmade object first crossed that imaginary line named after a Hungarian American physicist.
It was a V-2 rocket called MW 18014, launched from the Peenemünde Army Research Center on the Baltic Sea. They wanted to test how the rocket would perform in a vacuum, and didn’t see its altitude record of 176km as all that significant. It did not achieve an orbital velocity, and came crashing back down to Earth, just like a lot of other V2s did, except this one wasn’t filled with explosives designed to blow up London. The following September the Germans would begin launching thousands of V2s against Allied targets. They weren’t that accurate, but being that they travelled at supersonic speeds they would impact without warning, making them impossible to defend against.
Peenemünde’s technical director was Wernher von Braun. The rockets were built at Mittelwerk, which used slave labor from the nearby Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in their construction. Von Braun visited Mittelwerk regularly and doubtless knew of the horrible conditions. In a terrible irony, more people died in the construction of V-2 rockets than from their use as a weapon of war.
But who cares about that because Wernher and his pals knew valuable science shit so the U.S. did this Operation Paperclip thing and took 1,600 German scientists and engineers and shipped them back to America to work for the government in winning the space race against those dirty-commie Soviets. The USSR did the exact same thing with over 2,000 German scientists.
Oh, a bunch of them were actual Nazi party members and even Nazi leaders? Well, we can overlook that because science. Years later President Truman justified the operation with some lesser evil bullshit saying commies are bad so we didn’t have a choice.
Only one Paperclip scientist was ever tried for a war crime, but he was acquitted.
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