The Progenitor
"The rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet."
— WERNHER VON BRAUN
On 20 June 1944, a V-2 rocket (MW 18014) became the first man-made object to cross the Kármán line (100 km), reaching an apogee of 176 km.
Though built as a weapon of terror, its technology—the turbopumps, the guidance vanes, the liquid propellant—became the DNA of every rocket that followed, from the R-7 to the Saturn V.