Conjecture seems to have stopped on this trivia question.
The first man-made object to reach outer space was a shell from the
big gun hidden in the Ardennes Wood during World War I. It was a
terror weapon, lobbing shells into Paris from seemingly out of
nowhere, from its emplacement fifty miles behind enemy lines. The
parabolic arc that the shell traversed on its way to Paris peaked at
101-103 miles above sea level.
My buddy and one-time classmate (a professor of medieval literature
at a college in Ohio now, and an enthusiast/documenter of weaponry)
handed me a little history written about these guns a year or ten
back. They were not deemed as being terribly successful at causing
the terror they were supposed to because it was difficult to aim them
effectively, technology of the time didn't deal very well with
lobbing shells such a distance. The way the crew figured whether the
shell had gotten to Paris was to have a metal slug in the firing
chamber and to measure its deformity after firing. So much
compression and they knew that enough energy had thrown the shell at
least as far as Paris. Then sighting crews operating undercover in
Paris would relay back where it landed over the course of a few
hours. They had problems with the barrels and firing chambers due to
the energies involved. The guns were kept super-secret, they built
and hid rail tracks to a couple of emplacements and kept even their
own people away from them.
Regards the flying manhole cover ... Even if one did reach outer
space, that's a lot less than achieving escape velocity. It takes a
heck of a lot of energy to achieve 7 miles per second velocity. The
big gun's shells didn't get anywhere near escape velocity.
If I can find the title and author of the book, I'll post it. I know
I gave it back to James a while back.
Godfrey
On Apr 12, 2006, at 12:21 PM, Shel Belinkoff wrote:
My recollection is that it was a German V2 rocket launched after
the war
(1946, 47 comes to mind) which attained an altitude of about 110
miles.
There is a story that's been circulating for some years about a
manhole
cover that was somehow blasted into space (and, if true, said
manhole cover
should be just past the outer edge of our solar system by now). I
also
recall reading, or hearing about, a Soviet ICBM that went almost 1,000
miles into space shortly before Sputnik, but my memory is quite
vague on
that. I'm doing this without using Google, so I'm anxious to hear
what you
and others have to say.
Shel
[Original Message]
From: Godfrey DiGiorgi
Given that the near limit of outer space is considered to be 100
miles elevation from sea level, what was the first man-made object to
reach outer space?
