Von Braun was obsessed by grandiose futuristic fantasies, and Dornberger felt he constantly had to throw cold water on the engineer to keep them in check. But this tendency was easily overshadowed by Von Braun's fantastic ability to solve a technical problem, to throw all the extraneous ballast overboard and concentrate on the solution. In the moment the solution was technically realised, Von Braun no longer had any interest in the issue and dropped it.

There was never any doubt that manned space travel was Von Braun's life goal. The technology needed for manned flight presented many such technical challenges. He realised early on that only multi-staged liquid propelled rockets could achieve his dream. Rockets certainly needed lighter propellant tanks, but there was a practical technical limit to this, and in any case, there still had to be a payload. Von Braun knew that liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen was the ultimate propellant combination, but also that learning how to handle liquid hydrogen would be a long-term affair. A one-year study at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden and Peenemuende showed that other propellant combinations could produce no more than a 20% improvement in specific impulse compared to the existing V-2 technology. Therefore a multistage rocket was the only way to achieve orbital spaceflight.

Cuban pilot cosmonaut 1978-1980. First Cuban astronaut. First person of African descent to fly in space. Graduated from Air Force Academy Pilot, Cuban Air Force. Director of the Organization for Civil Defense in Cuba. 1 spaceflight, 7.9 days in space. Flew to orbit on Soyuz 38 (1980).

The engine runs for 5 seconds before exploding, producing a thrust of 719 kgf. A second test the following day produces 650 kgf for only four seconds before exploding. Thermal transfer from the engine to the missile structure is found to be the cause, and changes are made.

The missile was being tested on Test Stand VII; no launch had been planned. G Harry Stine noticed that the German rocket scientists at White Sands were very reluctant to talk about the details of the failure, but finally managed to get the real story from Konrad Dannenberg:

The first A.4 missile was a hand-made job. Motor tests preceding the first flight were to be carried out in a huge, mobile test stand, which held the entire missile. However, this first A.4 never flew; it found its end in the test stand. In order to clamp the missile into the stand without attaching the thrust mounts to the missile structure, a large steel corset was built. Unfortunately, the builders of this corset did not take into account the shrinkage of the missile components when the frigid liquid oxygen was pumped aboard. The first A4 shrank, dropped out of the corset, and was a total wash-out.

Russian pilot cosmonaut 1970-1992. 1 spaceflight, 211.4 days in space. Flew to orbit on Soyuz T-5 (1982). From 1992 to 1999, Deputy President, Russian Space Federation.Retired for medical reasons (due to injuries he received as the victim in an armed robbery).

Russian physician cosmonaut 1972-1995. Longest single space flight (437 days). 678 cumulative days in space. Civilian Physician, Institute of Medical Biological Problems. 2 spaceflights, 678.7 days in space. Flew to orbit on Soyuz TM-6 (1988), Soyuz TM-18.

The early failure rate of the A4 prototype missiles was extremely high, so the Peenemuende rocket team had to develop new measures to test and improve reliability down to the component level. This included improved quality control during manufacture, and test of the missile's components in all weathers, not just in heated laboratories. This resulted in the overall missile failure rate declining from 17% in the early test series to 4% in the final series. The V-1/Fi-103 cruise missile had a 28% higher failure rate, even though it was a simpler design.

First glide flight was on 10 September 1941, but the factory had to be evacuated to Sverdlovsk. Accidents in ground runs of the rocket engine further delayed the first powered flight. First flight performance was: First flight BI-1. Maximum Speed - 400 kph. Maximum Altitude - 840 m. Flight Time - 189 sec.

Goddard's rocket team and equipment were moved from Roswell, New Mexico, to the Naval Engineering Experiment Station at Annapolis, Maryland, where they continued work until the end of the war. During this time a liquid-propellant assisted-takeoff unit for aircraft was developed and flight-tested.

Solid propellant rockets were fired from a submerged platform off Greifswalder Oie to test the concept of a submarine-launched missile. The idea came from Steihoff, an engineer on the rocket team whose brother was a submarine captain. 20 to 30 Wurfgeraete of the Army's smoke corps, equipped with flammable oil or explosive warheads, were shot at the coast from up to 3 km away. The concept was to put enemy coastal oil storage tanks into flames. At Swinemuende a launcher was installed aboard a Submarine and salvoes of 20 rockets successfully fired from 10 to 15 m under water. The launcher was unnoticeable on the submarine, and the dispersion of the rockets was only a bit worse than a shot from land. But the German Navy wouldn't accept simply using an existing Army launcher. They insisted on developing a different one themselves, which would take a year, putting deployment of the system beyond the end of the war.

A third of the test material for the Algerian flight tests had been unloaded in Oran, and the team and the rest of the material were ready to embark at Marseilles. Then news comes of the Allied landings in North Africa. The flight tests were immediately called off, and the team hid all materials in Algeria and France. At the end of 1942, the Germans occupy Vichy France and all further work on the project is supended.

Using catapults and wings an A9 might nearly achieve 1000 km range, but the only solution for transatlantic missions was the two-stage A9/A10. The A10 boost stage was to have a total mass of 87 tonnes, of which 62 tonnes would be propellant. The stage's 200 tonne thrust motor would burn for 50 to 60 seconds, taking the A9 upper stage to 1200 m/s. Then the A9 would separate and burn its engine, reaching an apogee of 55 km, followed by a long hypersonic glide in the atmosphere. The second stage would be equipped with air brakes for deceleration over the target, followed by a parachute for recovery in the water. The A9/A10 would reach a maximum velocity of 2800 m/s, and have a range of 4100 km, and a total flight time of 35 minutes. Full-scale development was underway, when further significant work on the project was stopped at the end of 1942. Only the Advanced Projects Group, under the direction of Dip-Ing Roth and Ing Palt, continued design of the missile. It was also planned to develop, after the war, a stratospheric rocket that could travel in 40 minutes from Europe to America. After that, the target was orbital spaceships that could reach 8 km/sec and 500 km orbital altitude. Beyond that, space stations and the burial in space of the embalmed bodies of the rocket developers and men of the rocket service. Manned expeditions to the moon were also a popular theme for research. Finally, the use of nuclear energy to achieve interstellar travel was studied by the Advanced Projects Group.

A rail-launched A4 was considered from the beginning of the project. At the end of 1942 the first train launcher wagon was completed and trials began from Test Stand VII at Peenemuende. In service the trains would have hidden in double-tracked train tunnels. Development was interrupted to get the vehicle-towed standard version of the weapon into service.