V2 rocket technology3/2/2024 At the time, radio telemetry was primitive and unreliable, and scientists wanted to recover the recording devices. Based on his experience designing a miniature radar set that could withstand drastic acceleration, Van Allen believed he knew how to create equipment that could survive the forces of launch and impact.Įrnst Krause’s Naval Research Laboratory team from Washington, DC, also placed inside these first V-2s armored cylinders containing test film for future experiments. Van Allen worked for the John Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Silver Spring, Maryland, which had developed the proximity fuse for artillery shells in World War II. The primary experiment on the first flights was Dr. Such research would not only provide new knowledge, it would help the military understand the environment through which missiles would pass.Ī search party digs through the crater left by a returning V-2 rocket. Holger Toftoy, the Army Ordnance officer in charge of the rocket program, had seen from the outset that V-2 flights provided an opportunity to do science in the upper atmosphere and near space. Inside the nosecone of the April 16 and May 10 rockets, as well as other early White Sands V-2s, were heavy steel cylinders containing experimental equipment. It was the first launch into space from the United States, and by anyone except the Germans, whose V-2 had routinely crossed that line during wartime testing and operations of the ballistic missile in Europe. On May 10, the second V-2 ascended to an altitude of 70 miles (113 kilometers), well over the 100 km line now widely accepted as the definition of where space begins. Three-and-a-half weeks after the first launch attempt on April 16, GE personnel tried again, assisted by the Army, the Germans, and two research groups tied to the Navy. Readying the May 10, 1946, V-2 for launch. The von Braun team’s primary job would be to develop Hermes II, an experimental ramjet cruise missile launched on top of a V-2. Over time, as American personnel gained more experience, the German role in assisting GE at White Sands diminished. The General Electric Company was responsible for preparing rockets at White Sands under the Army’s Hermes program, which, following the discovery of the German rocket program in 1943, was initiated to develop guided missiles. But they weren’t put in charge of the V-2 launches. The von Braun group was housed at Fort Bliss outside El Paso, just across the Texas line. A group of about 125, led by Wernher von Braun, had been imported under Project Paperclip, which aimed to transfer German technological knowledge to the U.S. Army Ordnance teams evacuated components for a hundred V-2s and shipped them off to the Southwest desert to gain experience operating the world’s first ballistic missile.Īssisting in the first American launch were some of the very German rocket engineers who had designed the rocket used to kill people in Paris, London and Antwerp. After the war was over, and before the Soviets could move into their designated occupation zone, U.S. The guidance system failed, a fin came off, and the rocket-after reaching an altitude of only 3.4 miles-crashed in the desert.Īlmost exactly one year earlier, American troops had overrun the underground Mittelwerk V-weapons production plant in central Germany, in the process liberating several hundred very sick concentration camp prisoners in the adjacent camp and in the nearby city of Nordhausen. Army’s new White Sands Proving Ground in south-central New Mexico. At 2:47 on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 16, 1946, a captured Nazi V-2 missile ascended from the U.S.
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