In the 19th century, the armed forces of many European and Latin American countries widely used rockets with powder engines. But the spread of rifled breech-loading artillery guns for a long time excluded combat missiles from the arsenal of means of warfare. After the First World War, a fundamentally new stage in the history of rocket science began. The impetus for this was the transition from powder engines to liquid engines with a colossal energy potential. The main line of this book is to consider the path along which German designers, starting in 1931 with the tiny HW-1 of Joseph Winkler and Mirak-1 Rudolf Nebel, flying no higher than 60 meters, for 13 years came to the huge rocket "Aggregate-4" Werner von Braun, overcoming in 1944 at supersonic speed the border of near space.