German engineer Wernher von Braun was not the first to experiment with modern rocketry. That distinction goes to Robert Goddard, born in Worcester, Mass., who dreamed of space travel and built prototype rockets in his workshop in the early 1930s. But von Braun and his colleagues, working for the Nazi war machine in the late 1930s and early 1940s, were the first to perfect a liquid-fueled rocket that would travel a long distance—200 miles. A successor of the jet-propelled V-1, it was named the V-2, or Vengeance-2. More than 1,000 V-2s, each weighing about 12 tons at liftoff, were fired on London between September, 1944, and March, 1945. Modern weaponry has its origins in this German technology: Ballistic missiles employ rocket power like the V-2, while cruise missiles use jet engines like the V-1.