Hemmings Motor News Blog Blog

Hemmings Motor News Blog

Hemmings Motor News has been around since 1954. We're proud of our heritage, but we're also more than the Hemmings full of classifieds that your father subscribed to. Aside from new editorial content every month in Hemmings, we have three monthly magazines: Hemmings Muscle Machines, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car.

While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.

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Fritz von Opel's Rocket-Powered Car

Posted May 22, 2008 12:01 AM by dstrohl

It's no surprise at all that the rocket age began in Germany. But a story that includes dropping V2 rockets on the innocent population of London in the Blitz began 15 years earlier, and the only explosives involved were the 24 rockets with 265 pounds of propellant behind Fritz von Opel's head. The dream started in 1927 when Max Valier, a South Tyrolean astronomer, test pilot and author of The Advance into Space approached von Opel seeking support for his rocket engine research. By the spring of 1928, the company announced the public debut of a rocket-powered car, called RAK ("Raketenwagen") 1.

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Re: Fritz von Opel's Rocket-Powered Car

05/23/2008 7:13 AM

"A few weeks later, in attempt to break that record, RAK 4 (and the cat it carried as a passenger) was destroyed in a massive explosion."

poor kitty, Del was this a relative?

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