If the Nazis had won World War II, Germany would have been the first country to have sent astronauts into the space.

A strategy was devised by German rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun to go beyond earth in the late 1940s and early 50s. Braun was the first to develop liquid fuelled rockets as military weapons.

Discovery news reported that von Braun and many from his rocket team surrendered to the Allies at the end of WWII. He then engaged himself in building the Saturn V moon rocket for the Apollo missions.

It could have been a different history in the history of space travel, had a victorious German empire emerged from WWII. It could have enabled von Braun to convince his Nazi overlords to provide exorbitant resources to make his childhood dream of space conquest come true.

Advantage of putting weapons into space was realized during WWII by German engineers. An idea of putting a gigantic space mirror to a space station was conceived by them to focus sunlight to incinerate targets similar to frying an ant under a magnifying glass.

Von Braun thought of a station that could be a staging area for constructing large interplanetary spacecraft. He saw it as massive and without any hindrance by aerodynamic design needed to ascend from Earth.