The first photograph of Earth from space, taken in October 1946, was captured by a camera strapped to a captured Nazi vengeance weapon. This episode tells the story of the V-2, the world's first modern ballistic missile, from the German rocket craze of the late 1920s and a teenage Wernher von Braun arrested for launching a fireworks-powered wagon down a public street, to the classified work at Peenemunde that invented supersonic aerodynamics, liquid-fuel engines, hydrogen-peroxide turbopumps, and graphite vanes that steered the rocket from inside its own exhaust.

We examine the air-burst problem solved with tin trousers, the technicians who drank the ethanol fuel until management poisoned it, and the move to the underground Mittelwerk factory, where an estimated 20,000 enslaved laborers died, more than the weapon killed in combat. The episo ...