German Rocketry.... [PIC]

By the end of WWl, many Germans felt that rocketry was the key to space exploration like this 1929 Fritz Lang film:

 Whereas even in the late 1930s, a trip to the moon in the rest of the West's minds, required being shot out of a canon like the 1936 "Things To Come":

 While Americans viewed Robert Goddard's work as folly, German scientists banded together to form the "Spaceflight Society" in the mid 1920s to explore the potential use and refinement of rocket engines even receiving government subsidies ( this was even by the Weimar government before 1933). Max Valier and Friedrich Sander, a pyrotechnic engineer approached auto manufacturer Fritz von Opel with plans to built rocket powered vehicles and aircraft. Thus began the RAK series of rocket cars, rail cars and an aircraft. The first really successful rocket car was the Opel RAK2 (shown below) which achieved a speed of 145 mph employing 26 sequentially fired rockets. The Opel RAK3 rail car reached 175 mph. (also shown below). The series of aircraft also using solid fuel (black powder) had some success but later work saw the future in liquid fuel which was advanced by scientists like Werner von Braun (and futurist Willy Ley) who was much more interested in space travel than bombing London. After seeing the Allies being hammered with the V-1 and V-2 as well as the ME-163 rocket plane, America and the Soviets finally took rocketry seriously and grabbed all the German scientists, plans and weaponry they could. And so began America's space program.

Now the Opel RAK3: