After Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, Britain, the United States, and U.S.S.R. captured a huge amount of German war documents and scientists involved with the V-2 project which bombarded London from late 1944 to early 1945 and Antwerp in 1945. Information on the V-2 missile was put to good use by the victorious US and Soviet Union for further development towards military missiles and early spaceflight. Britain, however, lacked the resources to match the two postwar superpowers as Britain won the war, but had to rebuild and pay back immense war debts to the United States. However, a British independent proposal put forward just one year after the war, if it had been properly developed, could have altered the history of space exploration as we know it. A two-man study group (R.A. Smith and H. E. Ross) of the British Interplanetary Society submitted a private design for an adapted German V-2 rocket to the Ministry of Supply on December 23, 1946. The civilian adaption consisted of a new pressurized cabin in the nose of the rocket, in place of the usual explosive 1,000 kg amatol warhead, which would enable a man to be launched as a passenger on the flight. The cabin was to be detachable, allowing the astronaut to experience several minutes of weightlessness, before it parachuted back to Earth. Due to lack of funding, however, the proposal was not adopted as fate would have it. Britain was still in the reconstruction phase in 1946 from all the war damage caused during the previous years by the Luftwaffe and V-Weapons campaign. The concept, however, is almost identical to that used by NASA in 1961, when US Astronauts Alan Sheppard and Gus Grissom were sent on sub-orbital flights with a Redstone rocket (ironically derived from the V-2), going through several minutes of weightlessness. Had the British succeeded in their manned V-2 and had both the resources and Ministry funding, the first moon rocket might have been named Brittania or Victoria and the Union Flag might have been planted on the moon instead of the Stars & Stripes.

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