I haven't looked at your link yet, mickeyone, but Hanna Reitsch was indeed a prominent test pilot in Nazi Germany (remarkable for a society that discouraged women from being anything other than wives and mothers of the Master Race).
She tested the V1 (what its British victims later called a "buzz bomb"), the unmanned drones that were the precursor to the rocket-powered V2s. The V1 was not a true rocket in the sense the V2 was, though it was fired somewaht like a rocket, or jet. It was launched from an elevated platform with skids, constructed at the appropriate angle to reach its target. It was a fairly simple concept: loaded with explosives and enough fuel to reach London, it simply stopped and dropped from the sky when the fuel ran out, wherever that happened to be. Today it's considered the first primitive cruise missile. I knew people who lived in London during the war and they said the V1s were terrifying, because you heard them coming, then had seconds to take shelter when you heard the droning stop as they ran out of fuel and fell -- with no one knowing where they'd hit.
There were apparently guidance problems with the early prototypes and to correct these test pilots went up in the V1s, which in actual combat were of course unmanned. Supposedly it was Reitsch who finally solved the problem after several men had been killed in the effort, but I never heard that she or anyone ever flew anything remotely close to 80,000 feet -- 5000 or lower would have been more like it. I'm sure 80,000 was beyond the V1's technology, and in any case the craft didn't have the design or equipment for a pilot to survive at that altitude. The V2 -- the world's first IRBM -- could have reached that altitude and more before coming back down to Earth, but no one ever rode as a pilot (or even occupant) on a V2. Nazi Germany's jet planes never attained such an altitude either, operating at a maximum of around 25,000 feet or so, about the same as most contemporary conventional planes' limits.
Her story in this endeavor is recounted, evidently with reasonable accuracy, in the 1965 film Operation Crossbow. I've seen some photos and articles about her over the years. She survived the war and was still alive in the 60s but I never learned what happened to her since. I presume she's long dead by now.
Thanks for the link, which should be interesting. I may know more after reading it, but for now I don't believe it was even technically feasible in 1944 to take a V1 to 80,000, let alone survive it. The V2, yes, for a few seconds as it arced back down to its target. But that was never a piloted craft and no one could have survived going up in it at all.
ADDENDUM. I just read the link you supplied for the entire article (the second link). I wasn't surprised that Hanna Reitsch was an unrepentent Nazi, but just how unrepentent shocks me. Among other things, she rests her evident denial of the Holocaust by quoting Hermann Goering telling her during the war that such tales were Allied lies. That's the extent of her inquiry into the issue, even decades later. She conveniently rearranges facts to suit her delusional Nazistic beliefs and regards Hitler as a dignified hero, and says the only thing Germans have to feel guilty about the war is that they lost. The fact that she tried to help the ruthlessly dictatorial socialist murderer Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana build his air force in the 60s because she believed he could become "the Hitler of Africa" would be laughable if it wasn't so deadly in its portents.
But except for a brief, unchallenged and unsubstantiated claim by Reitsch about going up 80,000 feet I saw no evidence that she actually flew that high. This sounds like the lie of a racist and arrogant woman desperate to prove that Nazi Germany did everything first and best. (Though it's correct that the V2 could reach 50 miles before coming back down to its target.)
Plainly, the author of this article, Ron Laytner, is an idiot who didn't examine her claims and just took everything she said at face value. He certainly seems to admire her uncritically -- though he matter-of-factly reports her actions and beliefs, he makes no effort to refute her lies, provide background and context, or give alternative points of view. Laytner treats her not merely admiringly but sympathetically, even deferentially, making it clear he too thinks it's unfair that she's been "left out of the history books", and giving Reitsch carte blanche to whine about this alleged "injustice".
Aeronautically, meanwhile, he blithely calls her the "first astronaut", which is preposterous, as her claims have no proof, fly in the face of known technological limitations and, as you say, are debatable because 80,000 isn't "space" anyway. Laytner's hyperbole at the outset in saying that without her jets wouldn't have been developed until years later, and we might still just be talking about going to the moon, are so asinine and ridiculous that the mind boggles. Reitsch was a pilot -- not an inventor or engineer. Credit von Braun and his crew with the actual development of such machines.
From a language or reportorial standpoint, Laytner is a talentless, inept and shallow writer who essentially took dictation from Hanna Reitsch, an obviously bitter and bigoted woman interested in inflating her role in history. He seems inordinately proud, even boastful, in stating that he was the only "reporter" she ever agreed to speak to. Given his un-curious and uncritical approach to her story, it's no wonder she agreed. Her description of flying into Berlin near the end is, to say the least, suspect and self-serving. (She did fly in, but her details of the experience are hardly to be taken at face value.) Most of her claims are unsubstantiated, but this guy just puts them down as if they were Gospel...or should I say, "Mein Kampf".
The article is interesting for its subject, but it needed a competent journalist with writing skills, knowledge and a willingness to investigate to pull it off fully and objectively. As it is, it's imbecile journalism, an insult to the truth as well as the millions of victims of Nazism, written by a lazy, slack-jawed incompetent at a brain-dead level suitable only for morons. Except for providing a peek at Ms. Reitsch's psychoses and mendacity, it's mostly uninformative in any meaningful way. Hanna Reitsch could have told Laytner she'd flown to the moon and he would have reported it straight, without comment. But at least I learned the dirty, reprehensible fanatic died in 1979, several decades too late.
And, oh yes, we found out that she hated the movie Operation Crossbow, for being made without her permission or input, calling it inaccurate. Yet more British and American lies endured by selfless Nazis such as she. (Actually, she comes of very well in the film...far better than the truth warranted.)
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