 In 1929, the Slovene officer Hermann Noordung was the first to imagine a complete space station in his book "The Problem of Space Travel".The first rocket to reach space was a German V-2 rocket, on a vertical test flight in June 1944.After the war ended, the research and development branch of the (British) Ordinance Office organised "Operation Backfire" which, in October 1945, assembled enough V-2 missiles and supporting components to enable the launch of three (possibly four, depending on source consulted) of them from a site near Cuxhaven in northern Germany.