Top 10 rockets facts

3 days. It took 1 minute of flight to reach Mach 1 and 12 minutes to enter Earth's orbit. After one and a half orbits, the third-stage engine pushed the spacecraft onto its three-day long travel to the Moon.

Japan. The MXY-7 Navy Suicide Attacker Ohka (pictured) was a manned flying bomb that was usually carried underneath a Mitsubishi G4M2e "Betty" Model 24J bomber to within range of its target; on release, the pilot would first glide towards the target and when close enough he would fire the Ohka's three solid-fuel rockets. The Japanese produced approximately 850 Ohkas, and seven US ships were damaged or sunk by them throughout the war.

In Kazakhstan. Baikonur Cosmodrome is located in the center of Kazakhstan on the right bank of the Syr Darya river. Both the space launch facility and the neighboring city of Baikonur are rented and administered by the Russian Federation.

In South America. The Guiana Space Centre is a French and European spaceport near Kourou in French Guiana since 1968. The location was chosen as it fulfils the two major geographical requirements of such a site: it is quite close to the equator, so that the spinning earth can impart some extra velocity to the rockets for free when launched eastward, and it has open sea to the east, so that lower stages of rockets and debris from launch failures cannot fall on human habitations.

Germans. V2, built by Wernher von Braun, was the first ballistic missile that could reach outer space. It was specifically targeted at London. Nazis also planned submarine-towed launch platforms, that would have allowed a U-boat to launch V-2 missiles against the United States.

Saturn V sent astronauts to the Moon. Fully fueled it had a total mass of 6.5 million pounds (3,000 metric tons) and a payload capacity of 260,000 pounds (120,000 kg). Its engines were heard from 50 miles away.

October 3, 1942. The first rocket that reached space was the German V2 rocket during a test flight Oct. 3, 1942.

24,791 mph (39,896 km/h). According to the 2002 Guinness World Records, Apollo 10 set the record for the highest speed attained by a manned vehicle: 39,897 km/h (11.08 km/s or 24,791 mph) on May 26, 1969, during the return from the Moon.

Rubber. SpaceShipOne is an experimental air-launched rocket-powered aircraft with suborbital flight capability at speeds of up to 900 m/s using a hybrid rocket motor. Tier One uses a hybrid rocket motor supplied by SpaceDev, with solid hydroxyl-terminated polybutadiene (HTPB, or rubber) fuel and liquid nitrous oxide oxidizer. It generates 88 kN (20,000 lbf) of thrust, and can burn for about 87 s (1.45 min).

From the Netherlands. The V-2 was the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile. The missile, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, was developed during the Second World War in Germany as a "vengeance weapon", assigned to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings against German cities. V2 rockets were fired from the Netherlands near the Hague