Walter Dornberger (Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1980-009-33 / CC-BY-SA 3.0) This is the world in which V-2, written by the head of the German rocket development program Walter Dornberger, takes place.

But the V-2 wasn’t the only rocket-powered vehicle that the Germans were working on, a whole series of follow-up vehicles were in the design phase when the Allies took Berlin in 1945. Some were ...

In fact, they already did so when the first German V-2 rocket reached space in 1942. Since then all the advances have been in making rockets larger and more efficient through innovations ...