© Mark Ollig
The Space Coast includes the area around Florida's Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Center, NASA's launch site of history-making spacecraft, including Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle.
Through 1963, this launch site was known as Cape Canaveral; however, from 1964 to 1974, it was called Cape Kennedy, in honor of the former 35th president.
Today, it is known as the Cape Canaveral Space Force Center.
The United States Explorer 1 satellite was launched Jan. 31, 1958, from Cape Canaveral using a Juno I four-stage Redstone rocket. It reached a height of 62 miles, which is recognized as the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space. This boundary line is also called the Kármán line and is named after Theodore von Kármán, a mathematician, aerospace engineer, and physicist who determined Earth’s atmospheric altitude boundary in 1957.
Explorer 1 was launched eight months before NASA officially opened its doors for business.
Many people believed Explorer 1 was the first rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, and for a long time, so did I.
After World War II, The United States obtained and modified German V-2 ballistic missiles to work with the US Army's RTV-G-4 (later nicknamed Bumper) and WAC Corporal's hypergolic liquid-fueled sounding rocket.
WAC Corporal’s rocket is used at high altitudes to gather atmospheric data and was designed and manufactured by Douglas Aircraft and the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, with the cooperation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, founded in 1936, at the California Institute of Technology.
The United States built eight of these rockets, and the first was launched May 13, 1948, from the White Sands Missile Ranch in New Mexico.
In 1950, the Bumper-WAC rocket tests moved to Cape Canaveral, FL.
A US modified V-2/RTV-G-4/WAC Corporal rocket called Bumper No. 8 became the first rocket launched, from Launch Pad 3 at Cape Canaveral July 24, 1950.
This rocket’s upper stage portion obtained an altitude of nearly 250 miles.
The rocket's V-2/RTV-G-4 ballistic missile's first stage produced 55,000 pounds of thrust at liftoff, while the WAC Corporal's second stage stayed attached.
After 60 seconds, the first stage shut down and separated while creating a high altitude “thrust boost” or bump to the WAC Corporal second stage portion.
The first stage's “bump” pushed the WAC Corporal rocket stage so that when its engine ignited for 45 seconds, it obtained a higher altitude; thus, the rocket nickname “Bumper” was born.
The Bumper Program launched its first six rockets from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
The last two Bumper rockets, No. 8, launched July 24, 1950, and No. 7 (delayed) July 29, 1950, from Cape Canaveral, FL.
I just realized, Bumper No. 7 would be the first rocket launch attempt to be “scrubbed” at Cape Canaveral.
The first rocket launched into space was June 20, 1944, when the underground German World War II factory, Mittelwerk, test-fired its MW 18014 German A-4/V-2 rocket from the town of Peenemünde, located in north-east Germany off the Baltic Sea.
The MW 18014 rocket reached a height of 109.36 miles above the Earth.
Wernher von Braun, a German (and future American) aerospace engineer, designed and led the development of the V-2 rocket at Peenemünde.
The US launched a modified V2 rocket equipped with a 35-millimeter motion film camera Oct. 24, 1946, from the White Sands Missile Range. It reached a height of 65 miles within three minutes.
The rocket’s onboard camera recorded the first views of the Earth ever seen from space, and took a new picture frame every second and a half as it ascended above our planet.
After reaching apogee, the modified V2 descended to Earth and crashed; however, a hardened steel case protected the film inside the camera.
A Universal News film of this event can be seen at https://bit.ly/3JuZ9ly.
Sometimes, media in space technology comically quote a 1936 New York Times newspaper article containing: “A rocket will never leave the Earth's atmosphere.”
I have yet to find this newspaper while searching through the archives of the New York Times; however, I did find a New York Times newspaper from Jan. 12, 1920, with a front-page article titled “Believes Rocket Can Reach Moon.”
The 1920 article describes Professor Robert H. Goddard’s testing of “a new type of multiple-charge, high efficiency rocket of an entirely new design.”
“The claim is made for the rocket that it will not only be possible to send this apparatus to the higher layers of the air, including those beyond Earth's atmosphere, but possibly even as far as the moon itself,” the 102-year-old article said.
The first human-made object reached the moon’s surface, Sept. 14, 1959, 39 years after Goddard’s rocket claim.
Hey, New York Times, have you written a retraction to your 1936 article about a rocket never leaving the Earth’s atmosphere?
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| The Bumper 8 launch on July 24, 1950 Source: NASA |