Bumper 8 and the first launch from Cape Canaveral, July 24, 1950
The first rocket launched from Cape Canaveral was Bumper 8, a captured German V-2 topped with an American WAC Corporal, on July 24, 1950. Its upper stage separated but never fired. What NASA's own history records about the launch and the program behind it.
The first rocket launched from Cape Canaveral was Bumper 8, on July 24, 1950. It was a two-stage vehicle: a German V-2 missile captured at the end of World War II as the first stage, and a scaled-down American Corporal sounding rocket, the WAC Corporal, as the second. The V-2 flew. The WAC Corporal separated but never fired. It was still the start of everything that has launched from the Space Coast since.
From White Sands to Florida
The Bumper program began in New Mexico. According to NASA’s history of the launch, the German rocket specialists brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip went to Fort Bliss, Texas, near the new White Sands Proving Ground, where they worked on rockets for the U.S. Army. Army engineers there paired the V-2 with the WAC Corporal, built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and produced the first working two-stage liquid-fueled rocket. The flights at White Sands mostly failed, until the fifth WAC Bumper, on February 24, 1949, reached 5,000 miles an hour and an altitude of 244 miles, more than double the previous V-2 record and, in NASA’s words, “the first object to enter extra-terrestrial space.”
White Sands was good for straight-up flights. Tests that needed to fly a long way horizontally needed a range over water, and none existed. So the Army, Air Force and Navy jointly set up the Long Range Proving Ground on a remote stretch of central Florida coast at Cape Canaveral. NASA gives two reasons for the choice: the area’s low population and its nearness to an abandoned naval base, the Banana River Naval Air Station, later Patrick Air Force Base. The Army Corps of Engineers built Launch Complex 3, a pad and a blockhouse, for the Bumper tests.
July 1950
Bumper 7 was supposed to go first. It was ready on July 19, 1950, but delays left its V-2 stage full of liquid oxygen nine hours longer than planned, and in the humid Florida air moisture built up until a valve failed to open. The launch was scrubbed, Bumper 7 was taken off the pad for repairs, and Bumper 8 took its place.
On July 24 Bumper 8 lifted off normally. Then, NASA’s account says, the missile “heeled over to 10 degrees instead of the planned 22 degrees,” putting so much strain on the WAC Corporal that the second stage separated but failed to ignite.
Engineers tried again with the repaired Bumper 7 on July 29. It did somewhat better. The V-2 again flew lower than planned, but the WAC Corporal separated at 8.5 miles up and fired for 40 seconds, reaching more than 3,200 miles an hour, about half the speed intended, and traveling 150 miles downrange. That was the last Bumper flight.
What came after
Launch Complex 3 stayed in use for other rockets. In 1951, NASA’s history notes, the Air Force renamed the range the Cape Canaveral Auxiliary Air Force Base. Two years later the first Redstone rocket lifted off from the new Complex 4. With upper stages added, the Redstone became the Juno 1 that launched Explorer 1, America’s first satellite, on January 31, 1958, and in 1961 it carried Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom on their suborbital Mercury flights.
For what the launches did to the county around the Cape, see Brevard in the space boom.
Further Reading
Sources
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