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Everybody working in rocketry knows of von Braun, who made the V2 missiles that devastated London in the second world war. In the final stages of the war von Braun was captured by the allied forces. As a tribute to his genius, von Braun was given the top position in the rocketry program at NASA. Working for the US army, von Braun produced the landmark Jupiter missile, which was the first IRBM to cross the 3000 km range.

The V2 missile, an abbreviation of the German word Vergeltungswaffe, was by far the greatest single achievement in the history of rockets and missiles. It was the culmination of the efforts made by von Braun and his team in the VFR, the society for space flight, in the 1920s. What had begun as a civilian effort, soon became an official army one, and Von Braun became the technical director of the German missile laboratory at Kummersdorf. The V2 missile was first tested unsuccessfully in June 1942. It toppled over on its side and exploded. But on 16 August 1942, it became the first missile to exceed the speed of sound. Under the supervision of von Braun, more than 10,000 V2 missiles were produced between April and October in 1944 at the gigantic underground production unit near Nordhausen in Germany.

Excerpted from pages 87-88 of ‘Wings of Fire’ by APJ Abdul Kalam