V-4 (rocket launch)

V-4 was the first mostly-successful launch of the Aggregat 4 rocket, later known as Vergeltungswaffe 2. The launch occurred on the afternoon of 3 October 1942 and the rocket set a speed record of Mach 4, reached an apogee of, thereby becoming the first artificial object to reach both the mesosphere and the thermosphere, surpassing the apogee of set by the Paris gun in 1918.
At the time, the V-4 launch was considered the first time a man-made object reached outer space. That evening, Walter Dornberger declared in a speech at Peenemunde,
In 1960, the World Air Sports Federation defined a boundary for space at, while the United States' Air Force, NASA and Federal Aviation Administration consider the space boundary, the lower mesopause. The V-4 launch satisfied the present-day American definition, while it did not cross the FAI's 100 km line. The 100 km boundary was established much later however, and the V-4 trajectory did reach the Kármán altitude range, of which the 100-kilometer boundary is simply a round-number approximation.