This involved clustering 18 of the 1.5 tonne combustion chambers and feeding their exhaust into a common 'mixing chamber'. Finally an interim solution was found to produce engines for test A4 missiles found. But all attempts to scale this engine up to the thrust required for the A4 met insurmountable combustion instability problems. Eventually, through a seven-year process of trial and error, a fuel-cooled rocket engine of 1.5 tonnes thrust and a specific impulse of 215 seconds was perfected. The A4 would need an engine of 25 tonnes thrust. Detailed design of the A4 was postponed until aerodynamics and control systems could be worked out in a new subscale design, the A5.ĭevelopment of the rocket engine for the A4 was also bedeviled with difficulties. The A3 was a miserable failure - it was clear that the control system and aerodynamics were completely wrong. The A3 had a thrust of 1500 kgf, but still used the same cooling method and had a specific impulse of only 195 seconds. After another three years, in December 1937, Von Braun launched the A3, which was supposed to be a subscale prototype for the A4 war rocket. But this design of December 1934 still used a primitive cooling method - the combustion chamber and rocket nozzle were immersed in the fuel tank. After 28 months of development, Von Braun was able to demonstrate the A2, a small rocket generating 300 kgf to the German Army. The VfR had fired only the most rudimentary of pressure-fed water-cooled combustion chambers, generating only 60 kgf at a specific impulse of 173 seconds. When Wernher von Braun was recruited to assist Walter Dornberger in the development of liquid fuel rockets for the German Army in August 1932, only the tiniest baby steps toward development of rocket motors had been taken by the German Society for Spaceship Flight (VfR). At war's end the Allies seized tons of documents, hundreds of experts, and dozens of V-2 missiles. Unlike the atomic bomb, the V-2 was not a war-changing weapon, and the resources devoted to it undoubtedly hurt rather than helped the German war effort. Both were developed in enormous haste used the first technical solutions that worked consumed a considerable portion of the country's war budget and were only available in the last months of the war. The V-2 and the atomic bomb both were world-shifting technological quantum leaps. Later versions - the A6 through A12 - were planned to take the Third Reich to the planets.ĪKA: A4 Vergeltungswaffen-2. The A1, A2, A3, and A5 were steps in the development of the missile. Personnel and technology from the V-2 program formed the starting point for post-war rocketry development in America, Russia, and France. The British, Americans, and Russians launched a further 86 captured German V-2's in 1945-1952. Despite the scale of this effort, the inaccurate missile did not change the course of the war and proved to be an enormous waste of resources. As many as 3,225 were launched in combat, primarily against Antwerp and London, and a further 1,000 to 1,750 were fired in tests and training. 6,084 V-2 missiles were built, 95% of them by 20,000 slave laborers in the last seven months of World War II at a unit price of $ 17,877. It represented an enormous quantum leap in technology, financed by Nazi Germany in a huge development program that cost at least $ 2 billion in 1944 dollars. The V-2 ballistic missile (known to its designers as the A4) was the world's first operational liquid fuel rocket.
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