The Missile RaceThe end of World War II came in 1945, when Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two Japanese cities, were each destroyed by a single atomic bomb. Rocketry suddenly took on a new, terrifying image. The 1-ton payload of the German V2 only caused limited damage: it was an unstoppable terror weapon, but strategically insignificant. Now that destructive power could be increased 20,000 times. Ten years later, when the H-bomb was perfected, that ratio climbed into the millions. This realization, in the years after World War II, turned the military into a major supporter of rocket development, especially in the US and in the USSR, the Soviet Union (now the Russian republic and its allies). Though many people still dreamt of exploring space, the support money--for a while at least--went to the development of missiles.
The early military rockets were actually quite adaptable to scientific uses. The military sought "Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles" (ICBMs) able to hit any point on Earth, and for this they had to be able to impart a velocity very close to the one needed to achieve an orbit above the atmosphere. Both the US and the USSR concentrated on liquid-fueled rockets. The US captured a fair number of usable V2s, as well as the German rocket-design team headed by Wernher von Braun, who soon took a key role in the development of US missiles. The USSR also captured V2 engines, and Russian rocket designers, headed by Valentin Glushko and Sergei Korolev ("Koralyov") duplicated those rockets and then went on to develop their own, more powerful designs. In the US these efforts led to the Thor and Jupiter rockets with a range of the order of 2000-3000 km, and to the Atlas, whose range was indeed intercontinental. At the same time a series of scientific rockets was developed from JPL's "Corporal", namely the Aerobee for studies of the upper atmosphere and the Viking, a larger vehicle. More limited development projects for missiles and scientific rockets took place in Britain and France. The International Geophysical YearScientific rockets made possible, for the first time, studies of high altitude phenomena and observations of the Sun in ultra-violet wavelengths, usually blocked by the atmosphere. Among those active here was James Van Allen, who in the late 1940s sent Geiger counters, detectors of fast ions and electrons, to high altitudes aboard Aerobee and V2 rockets. Aware that rockets wasted a great deal of energy overcoming air resistance, he and his team at the University of Iowa later suspended small scientific rockets from high-altitude balloons and fired them by remote control once they were above the bulk of the atmosphere. In 1953 one such rocket was fired into the polar aurora ("northern lights"--more details about it here) and observed a large incoming flow of fast particles, later identified as electrons. By international agreement 1957-8 was declared as the "International Geophysical Year" (IGY), a time for special international efforts to study the solid Earth, the ocean, atmosphere and the Earth's space environment. The US announced that it planned to launch at that time a small satellite with a radio beacon, the "Vanguard", using a multi-stage rocket based on the Viking technology. Unofficially Von Braun also prepared a military rocket for launching a satellite, which Van Allen's group at the University of Iowa provided, but he was not permitted to do so ahead of the official Vanguard mission. |
