Which of the following countries was the first to send an object into space?

The story behind the answer

Germany is correct: during World War II, a German V-2 rocket became the first human-made object to reach space when a test flight on 20 June 1944 climbed to about 176 km, above the 100 km Kármán line. This differs from “first in orbit”: the Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 (1957) was the first artificial satellite.

The V-2 was developed at Peenemünde by Wernher von Braun’s team under the Nazi regime and built with the exploitation of forced labor—a grim milestone. After the war, captured V-2s and engineers jump-started U.S. and Soviet rocketry, leading to the Space Race. Memory tip: V-2 vaulted to vacuum; Sputnik orbited later.