World War II: London is hit by a V-2 rocket for the first time.

The V-2 rocket, with the development name Aggregat-4 (A4), was the world's first practical, modern ballistic missile and suborbital launch vehicle. The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the Second World War in Nazi Germany as a "vengeance weapon" and assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings of German cities. After an altitude of 100 km was selected to define the edge of space, the V2 rocket also became retroactively the first artificial object to travel into space with the vertical launch of MW 18014 on 20 June 1944.