Intro
December 17, 1933 (1): Wehrmacht officers assembly at Kummersdorf to view a test of the A1, a new rocket designed by engineer Werner von Braun. The design hasn’t had all of the kinks worked out yet, and the rocket’s alcohol / liquid oxygen engine explodes on the pad. (2) There is one casualty, von Braun himself, who is tragically killed by a flying piece of shrapnel. Following this disaster, the German high command concludes that rockets such as the A1, and others that von Braun had supposedly designed (3), will be impractical as weapons of war, and almost entirely eliminate funding for this area of research. The failure of the A1 is also noted by the team of Soviet observers at the site.
May 1934: Austrian aerospace engineer Eugen Sanger emigrates to the US.
October 6, 1939: Soviet engineer Sergei Korolev, who, like many others, was accused of crimes against the state during Stalin’s purges, succumbs to a combination of disease and malnutrition while interned at the Kolyma gulag, and dies. It ultimately turns out that the charges against him were baseless.
(1) I was unable to find a specific date for when a test of the A1 occurred, just that it happened in 1933.
(2) The rocket actually did explode OTL, but obviously von Braun was not killed.
(3) Such as the A4.
December 17, 1933 (1): Wehrmacht officers assembly at Kummersdorf to view a test of the A1, a new rocket designed by engineer Werner von Braun. The design hasn’t had all of the kinks worked out yet, and the rocket’s alcohol / liquid oxygen engine explodes on the pad. (2) There is one casualty, von Braun himself, who is tragically killed by a flying piece of shrapnel. Following this disaster, the German high command concludes that rockets such as the A1, and others that von Braun had supposedly designed (3), will be impractical as weapons of war, and almost entirely eliminate funding for this area of research. The failure of the A1 is also noted by the team of Soviet observers at the site.
May 1934: Austrian aerospace engineer Eugen Sanger emigrates to the US.
October 6, 1939: Soviet engineer Sergei Korolev, who, like many others, was accused of crimes against the state during Stalin’s purges, succumbs to a combination of disease and malnutrition while interned at the Kolyma gulag, and dies. It ultimately turns out that the charges against him were baseless.
(1) I was unable to find a specific date for when a test of the A1 occurred, just that it happened in 1933.
(2) The rocket actually did explode OTL, but obviously von Braun was not killed.
(3) Such as the A4.
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