Germany spent the end of the 1930s and half the 1940s inventing and perfecting missiles. They made so many, they still had a ton of them left over after the end of World War II. So of course, the leftover weapons were confiscated by the United States. And here’s one of the things we did with them.

Anyone who knows the details about a V-2 rocket has to wonder how any nation managed to make so many of them. The V-2 ran on alcohol and liquid oxygen, only one of which was easy to get. It was a giant behemoth, standing forty-six feet high and weighing fifty-six thousand pounds. It moved through the air at 3,500 miles per hour. Production started on these models in the mid-1930s, but the first one wasn’t actually launched as a military weapon until September 1944, when the Germans bombed London with it.