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| Start of a V-2 rocket in 1943 |
The exploration of space began some seventy
years ago, as a continuation of the Third Reich’s war effort to develop
ballistic missiles (the V-2 rocket) to bombard Britain and other places without
the need of airplanes.
At the end of World War II, the two new great
powers (the United States and the Soviet Union) recruited the scientists and
technicians who had carried out the German advances in that field, took them to
their respective countries and started programs of space exploration, whose
first objective was, of course, to obtain military advantages in the cold war
that had just begun. As a result of Operation Paperclip (the US
recruitment program), German scientists as important as Werner von Braun went
to work in the United States. An equivalent Soviet program (the Operation
Osoaviakhim) did the same with other German scientists, perhaps less
known, but equally efficient. With their help, both superpowers began a space
race that would last several decades.
