June 20, 1944

MW 18014

MW 18014 A-4 test rocket reaches 174.6 kilometers

Nobody at the launch was celebrating a Kármán-line crossing. The 100-kilometre convention used to award that milestone would not be formulated for another decade.

A vertical shot from Greifswalder Oie

On 20 June 1944 a German Army A-4 test rocket designated MW 18014 was launched vertically from Greifswalder Oie, part of the Peenemünde test complex. The surviving report puts the launch at 14:30 and credits test unit 1./485.

It was one of a series of steep or vertical trials meant to study A-4 behaviour in near-vacuum and during high-speed reentry and breakup. A planned engine cutoff did not occur; the engine burned until the propellant was exhausted, for 67.5 seconds of powered flight.

174.6 kilometres, and back down

The rocket reached an apogee of 174.6 kilometres — far above the modern 100-kilometre Kármán line — and then fell back to Earth. Total flight time was 426 seconds.

It did not enter orbit. Crossing the Kármán line is not the same as orbiting, and this vehicle followed a suborbital path and struck the Earth.

Two reasons the “first in space” label is contested

The boundary concept was formulated in the mid-1950s, more than a decade after the flight, and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale formally adopted 100 kilometres as the aeronautics–astronautics line in 1960. Applying it to 1944 is necessarily retrospective.

A surviving German Hauptschussbericht, catalogued as BArch-MA RH 8/1286, reports that another rocket from the same island, MW 18012, reached approximately 127 kilometres on 18 June 1944 — two days earlier.

The vehicle's contemporary technical designation was A-4; “V-2” was the propaganda name announced publicly later in 1944.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes, 1 issue open Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree about when this happened.

What the sources leave uncertain

The launch date, vehicle identity, and approximately 174.6-kilometer apogee are well supported.
The “first object in space” milestone is disputed. A surviving German Hauptschussbericht, catalogued as BArch-MA RH 8/1286 and routed through the German A-4 launch list, reports that MW 18012 reached approximately 127 kilometers on 18 June 1944.
Some older sources also mention an undated 189-kilometer A-4 flight, but the cited archival report does not document it.
The Kármán line did not exist as a recognized 100-kilometer convention in 1944, so the spaceflight label is necessarily retrospective.