First Launch From ‘The Cape’ Leads to 75 Years of Historic Triumphs

By Bob Granath

On a warm morning during the summer of 1950, 75 years ago, a small group of engineers and technicians launched a two-stage rocket from a remote site on the east coast of Florida. The missile was the first to take flight from a new government installation called the Long Range Proving Ground. It appeared to locals as a “strange light” rising in the sky followed by a rumble in the distance. The strange sight was hardly noticed. But, it was the dawning of an era. Soon the eyes of the world would focus on the historic events taking place at Cape Canaveral.

In a land of palmetto scrubs previously populated only by alligators and mosquitos, Bumper 8 lifted off from the newly completed Launch Pad 3 at 9:28 a.m. on July 24, 1950. The missile was a 62-foot-tall German-built A-4 missile, for Aggregate-4. It was topped with a 24-foot U.S. Army WAC Corporal rocket. It was a low-angle atmospheric flight lasting 2-minutes.

The A-4 was developed for Germany during World War II as the world’s first ballistic missile. During testing on June 20, 1944, it was the first human-made object to reach the threshold of outer space. The Nazi propaganda ministry renamed the rocket “V-2” for “Vengeance Weapon-2.”

Developed by the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, the WAC Corporal was the first operational instrument-carrying rocket designed to measure and perform scientific experiments in the upper atmosphere. The V-2/WAC combination was the world’s first two-stage liquid propellant rocket. The goal was to investigate launching a two-stage vehicle, while studying phenomena associated with high-speed and high-altitude rocket flight.

Due to military secrecy of the Cold War, those in local communities such as Cocoa Beach and Titusville were told little of what was happening. That would eventually change, as Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center became the world’s premier, multi-user spaceport.

Military Rocket to Peacetime Research

Rocket technology in the United States advanced significantly following World War II. The rocket specialists who developed the V-2 wanted to take their skills to U.S. Army forces once the Americans advanced close enough to do so safely. The rocket’s technical director, Dr. Wernher von Braun, and 115 other specialists came to America with 100 of their rockets and conducted upper atmospheric research and experiments while based at Fort Bliss, Texas. They launched the V-2s from the White Sands Proving Grounds just over the state line in New Mexico.

Through the late 1940s and early 1950s, von Braun and his team launched 64 of the V-2s from White Sands. Scientific instruments gave scientists an early understanding of the challenges that would need to be overcome to launch satellites and human-rated spacecraft into orbit and beyond. On Oct. 24, 1946, a V-2 was launched with a 35-millimeter motion picture camera, providing the first ever imagery of the Earth from space.

In early 1946, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology proposed tests with a two-stage missile with a V-2 first stage and a second stage using the WAC Corporal. Later that year, the U.S. Army awarded a contract assigning responsibility for the effort to General Electric’s propulsion division.

Called the Bumper Project, it allowed scientists to study difficulties related to rocket stage separation and ignition at high altitudes. Staging was achieved by the V-2 sending signal to the WAC Corporal after reaching a predetermined speed. The signal told the WAC to ignite its engine. The exhaust flame from the upper stage then burned through a wire thus cutting it and sending a signal to the V-2 to shut down its engine. The small research rocket then would slide up a tube holding it in place.

Additionally, the two-stage combination greatly increased the maximum altitude attained by a WAC. After the V-2’s engine shut down, there was a high altitude “bump,” which provided the name for the rocket. A “bump” at high altitude refers to turbulence caused by air currents, often associated with thermals — rising air — or downdrafts.

Bumper test flights began at White Sands on May 13, 1948. The first four resulted in varying degrees of success. Bumper 5 was the first launched with the second stage fully fueled. One minute after lifting off the afternoon of Feb. 24, 1949, the WAC Corporal separated from the V-2 first stage and fired its own engine at an altitude of 20 miles and at a speed of 3,600 mile per hour. When the WAC Corporal’s fuel was depleted, six and a half minutes after ignition, it reached its maximum speed of more than 5,000 miles per hour, achieving an altitude of 250 miles – a world record for the time.

The seventh and eighth Bumpers lifted off from Cape Canaveral in 1950 as rocket testing moved from New Mexico to Florida. As the Cold War with the Soviet Union began to heat up during the late 1940s, the U.S. military needed larger missiles, traveling faster and farther. A launch site on the east coast was selected to allow rockets to travel over the unpopulated waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

In 1949, President Harry Truman formally established the Joint Long Range Proving Ground at Cape Canaveral. Just to the south, the Banana River Naval Air Station was transferred from the U.S. Navy to the U.S. Air Force and reopened as Patrick Air Force Base, headquarters for the new launch site.

The Future Begins

The first launch pads were rudimentary. The gantry for some of the early rockets were simple construction scaffolding or converted oil derricks. The launch pedestal was placed on a 100-foot concrete square. A small hut surrounded by sandbags served as a blockhouse about 100 yards from the launch pad for engineers and technicians from the Army, General Electric and the Cal. Tech.

The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Sarsfield was positioned down range beneath the position where staging occurred. The ship’s telemetry determined that Bumper 8 pitched over to an angle only 10 degrees above the horizon instead of the planned 22 degrees. Crews aboard the tracking ship observed the WAC Corporal’s nose failed following second stage separation. However, it reached an altitude of 10 miles and traveled 200 miles downrange.

Bumper 7 was scheduled to launch first on July 19, 1950. But a technical problem prevented engine ignition. While repairs were made, its sister rocket, Bumper 8, moved ahead. Bumper 7 was launched 10 days after its postponement, also reaching 10 miles in altitude after the V-2’s thrust waned 14 miles east of the Cape. After the two test launches, the Joint Long Range Proving Ground commander, Col. Harold Turner, announced that the tests were “a complete success in every way.” While his announcement was typical of the early Cold War, the U.S. Army teams demonstrated the ability to launch the first rockets from the new site and were successful in collecting needed data.

It would be another eight years before the United States launched its first satellite, Explorer 1. Later in 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower consolidated the nation’s civilian space efforts under NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Today, between the agency’s Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida’s Space Coast is on a pace to launch 100 rockets annually, 75 years after the fledgling start.

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