1942: The first successful V-2 rocket launch

On 3 October 1942, a team of German engineers led by Wernher von Braun achieved the first successful launch of the A-4 rocket, later known as the V-2, from the Peenemünde Army Research Center on the Baltic coast. The rocket reached an altitude of 84.5 kilometers and a range of 190 kilometers, becoming the first human-made object to reach the edge of space.

Though conceived as a weapon, the V-2 represented a leap in automatic control and guidance systems. Its inertial guidance used gyroscopes and accelerometers to adjust fins in flight—an early example of real-time feedback control. These engineering challenges demanded sophisticated calculations and analog computing devices to model trajectories and stability.

The intellectual thread from such work runs straight into the foundations of artificial intelligence. During the same war years, scientists on all sides wrestled with fire-control systems for anti-aircraft guns and missile guidance. Norbert Wiener, studying predictors for anti-aircraft fire, distilled these problems into the new field of cybernetics—the study of control and communication in animals and machines. His 1948 book Cybernetics explicitly linked feedback loops, computation, and purposeful behavior.

Wiener’s ideas, alongside the logical neurons of Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, helped shape early AI. The dream of machines that sense, decide, and act autonomously grew from the same soil as rocket guidance. Von Braun himself later directed the American rocket program that put humans on the Moon, a project that drove enormous advances in digital computing and software reliability.

Today the lineage is visible everywhere. Modern AI systems steer self-driving cars, stabilize drones, and guide robotic spacecraft using descendants of those mid-century control theories, now supercharged by machine learning. When an autonomous vehicle adjusts its path in real time or a Mars rover plans its next move, it echoes the feedback principles first proven in flight on that October day in 1942.