How Many Martinis Can You Fit Inside a V-2 Missile?
In the 1930s, at a remote site called Peenemünde in the north of Germany on the Baltic Sea, a team of rocket engineers working for the Army developed history’s first viable liquid fueled rocket. The A-4, better known by its Nazi-given moniker as the V-2, was a technological marvel that never became the game changing weapon Hitler hoped it would be. Throughout its development the V-2 was beset by technical and political problems, least known of which might be that technicians kept drinking the ethyl alcohol that was needed to fuel the rockets.
The V-2 was a small rocket by modern standards. A little more than 45 feet from nose to fins, five-and-a-half feet in diameter, and weighed about 27,000 pounds, it’s payload was a 2,200 pound warhead designed to detonate on impact. It’s engine was a technical masterpiece of its time. High-speed pumps forced large volumes of fuel into the thrust chamber such that the engine produced 56,000 pounds of thrust. This translated into a range of about 220 miles, a maximum altitude between 50 and 60 miles, and a top speed of 3,400 miles per hour. The V-2 broke the sound barrier not long after launch meaning that when it reached its target city — it was launched on London, Antwerp, Liege, Brussels, Paris, and Luxembourg — citizens never heard it coming. They heard the explosion, then they heard the delayed sonic boom.
But before the V-2 was launched as a weapon, Dornberger’s team with Wernher von Braun at its head worked out all the technical kinks at Peenemüde. Researchers and technicians honed the rocket’s aerodynamic design, developed and built its guidance system, and perfected the engine that used ethyl alcohol and water as fuel.
