The fate of civilizations during pivotal moments in history is often attributed to decisive actions accomplished by a daring few persons on some hallowed piece of ground. The 20th century witnessed many important technical, social, and political events. However, none of these events are equivalent in long-term significance to the future of the human race as was the first rocket launch from a deso- late patch of coastal scrubland in central Florida. On July 24,1950, Bumper 8, a modified German V-2 rocket with a WAC Corporal sec- ond stage, roared off a primitive launch pad located among the scrub palmettos of an isolated place called Cape Canaveral.
This modest technical achievement represented the first in a long procession of rocket launches from Cape Canaveral—launch- es that now mark a major milestone in the migration of conscious intelligence beyond the confines of our tiny planetary biosphere.
The destiny of the human race would never be the same. Consider the fact that here on Earth, the last such major evolutionary unfold- ing occurred about 350 million years ago, when prehistoric fish, called crossopterygians, first left the ancient seas and crawled up on the land. Scientists regard these early “explorers” as the ances- tors of all terrestrial animals with backbones and four limbs. Simi- larly, future galactic historians will note how life emerged out of Earth’s ancient oceans, paused briefly on the land, then boldly ven- tured forth from Cape Canaveral to the stars. Humanity’s bold leap toward the stars from Cape Canaveral also serves as a fitting epi- logue to this region’s rich and colorful past—a sometimes forgotten historical legacy replete with Native American lore, daring adven- turers, sunken treasure, and hardy pioneers.
Decades after the arrival of Christopher Columbus at San Sal- vador (in the Bahamas) in 1492, rival European powers began to bit- terly contest the ownership of Florida, primarily because it sat astride the main sea route between the Gulf of Mexico and the Old
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World. While Cape Canaveral remained a virtual wilderness with respect to European settlement, its coastal waters echoed with the sounds of cannon and muskets as pirates and privateers preyed upon Spanish treasure ships. The Ais, a warlike and sometimes cannibalistic Native American people, lived in the area and sur- vived chiefly on seafood and indigenous vegetation. They plun- dered the large number of Spanish shipwrecks that came ashore near Cape Canaveral, but rarely made prisoners of any survivors. In fact, fear of the fierce Ais was the primary reason that Spanish set- tlers did not occupy the portion of Florida near Cape Canaveral.
By the early 18th century the Cape witnessed the arrival of English settlers and their Native American allies (who later became known as the Seminoles) from settlements in Georgia and South Carolina. This marked the beginning of a new era of expansion and conflict in the area, which continued until the end of the Second United States–Seminole War in 1842. Then, in the years following the American Civil War, small rural towns and communities sprang up along a 110-kilometer stretch of mainland, rivers, barrier islands, and sandy beaches that later became known as Brevard County, Florida. Through World War II the principal industries of Brevard County were agriculture, fishing, and tourism.
But the development of the modern ballistic missile (especial- ly the German V-2 rocket) and the American atomic bomb during World War II soon generated military needs that placed Brevard County at the very center of the world stage. By virtue of its most prominent geographical feature, Cape Canaveral, this obscure region of central Florida became the focal point of a new era of exploration—the exploration of outer space. But this transition did not occur without a bit of luck and a lot of hard work.
As discussed here, the “Cape” is the geographic area on the east central coast of Florida (within Brevard County) that currently includes Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS), NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC), the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, Cape Canaveral National Seashore, and Port Canaveral. Although Cape Canaveral is possibly the most well-recognized
space launch facility on the planet, just after World War II the American government almost did not select the site for long-range missile testing. The United States emerged from World War II as the world’s only nuclear-armed superpower. The former Soviet Union soon challenged this dominant political and technical posi- tion. In 1946, responding to an anticipated cold war need to test mil- itary missiles over long distances, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (through their Joint Research and Development Board) established the Com- mittee on the Long-Range Proving Ground. As the name implies, the purpose of this committee was to study possible locations for a long-range rocket proving ground. The committee considered loca- tions in California, Florida, and Washington State. The committee’s first choice was El Centro, California; Cape Canaveral earned only a second-place ranking. The committee reasoned that the El Centro site was near the aerospace industry in Southern California, and a long-range rocket testing ground down the coast of Baja California was viewed as a convenient approach in the development of new missile systems.
However, fate intervened in a very unpredictable way and changed aerospace history. President Aleman of Mexico refused to allow American missile flights over Baja California. On the other hand, the United Kingdom was willing to allow American missile flights near the Bahamas Islands (then a British colony). Therefore, the El Centro site was abandoned and Cape Canaveral selected as the nation’s principal site for long-range rocket testing over water.
Cape Canaveral proved to be ideal for this task. Virtually unin- habited (in the early 1950s), the remote location let aerospace engi- neers and technicians inspect, fuel, and launch rockets without endangering nearby communities. Test rockets fired from the Cape were launched over open water instead of over populated land areas. In addition, the area’s sunny, subtropical climate permitted year-round operations. And, as an important performance bonus, this location provided a natural (“free”) velocity boost to rockets launched eastward due to the west-to-east rotation of Earth. The United States also developed Vandenberg Air Force Base in Cali- fornia to launch polar (north-south) orbiting spacecraft.
The international range site agreements were barely in place when a military-civilian team conducted the first rocket launch from the Cape on July 24, 1950. A tarpaper shack served as an impromptu “press site,” and the launch pad service structure was composed of painter’s scaffolding.
Despite the primitive facilities, Bumper 8 successfully flew. This launch inaugurated the new American rocket test range, a range that extended barely 320 kilometers at the time. The launch of Bumper 7 followed within just four days, on July 29, 1950. This second successful flight marked the end of the U.S. Army’s Project Bumper, an early ballistic missile test program that started at the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico and involved the use of captured German V-2 rockets. Wernher von Braun and his team of German rocket scientists, who had emigrated to the United States after World War II as part of Operation Paperclip, provided technical support for the U.S. Army’s missile program. Von Braun’s rocket engineering skills played a significant role in many other important launches from the Cape, including the first American satellite (Explorer 1), the first American to fly in space (astronaut
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The first rocket launch from Cape Canaveral took place on July 24, 1950. The Bumper 8 rocket, shown here lifting off, was a modified German V-2 rocket with a WAC Corporal second stage. (Courtesy
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Shepard in the Mercury Redstone 3 vehicle), and, of course, the incomparable Apollo lunar landing missions.
Immediately following the successful Bumper 8 and 7 launch- es came the “Age of the Winged Missiles.” In the early 1950s the fledgling U.S. Air Force began testing the Matador, Snark, Bomarc, Mace, and many other interesting winged guided missiles at the Cape. The Air Force’s most frequently launched missile, the Mata- dor, was first flight tested at the Cape on June 20, 1951.
Learning from all-too-frequent failures was an integral part of the early missile test and development business. Erratic winged missiles often made spectacular splashes in the waters near Cape Canaveral. For example, the frequent test failures of the Snark, a particularly error-prone bird, inspired local humorists to affection- ately refer to the ocean waters off Cape Canaveral as “Snark- infested” waters.
Despite numerous tests and reasonable engineering progress, the days of the early winged missiles were numbered, as more powerful ballistic missiles began to make their appearance. For instance, in August 1953 the U.S. Army launched its first Redstone rocket from Cape Canaveral. The Redstone was a medium-range, liquid-propellant ballistic missile that was a direct technical descendant of the German V-2 rocket. By the late 1950s, in response to a perceived missile gap with respect to the Soviet Union, American national security emphasis began shifting to the rapid development of a much longer-range type of ballistic missile, called the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
By the mid-1950s flight testing requirements for the Snark and Navaho winged missiles prompted the U.S. Air Force to expand the Eastern Test Range all the way down to Ascension Island, a tiny British Crown territory in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean near the equator. With Cape Canaveral as Station One, the Ameri- can long-range rocket test range extended a distance of about 8,000 km into the South Atlantic Ocean. However, the frequent test- ing of more powerful ballistic missiles, which eventually became the main users of the rocket range’s most distant outposts, soon eclipsed the long-range testing of winged missiles. Eventually, bal- listic missile tests from the Cape extended all the way past the southern tip of Africa into the Indian Ocean—a total distance of about 16,000 kilometers. To accommodate the need for timely and precise missile performance data all along flight paths, the U.S. Air Force supplemented its collection of down-range tracking sites with a fleet of specially instrumented tracking ships.
After a slow start, ballistic missile and space programs took root at the Cape and quickly dominated use of the range after 1957. The frequent flights of the winged missiles were replaced by launches of the U.S. Army’s Jupiter, the U.S. Navy’s Polaris, and the U.S. Air Force’s Thor, Atlas, Titan, and Minuteman ballistic missiles. All this activity focused on developing powerful and accurate deliv- ery systems for nuclear warheads—weapons of mass destruction that had grown even more lethal through improvements in Ameri- can nuclear weapon engineering, especially with the arrival of the hydrogen bomb.
With the birth of the space age on October 4, 1957, the rocket testing equation became far more complicated. From a secret mis-
sile test facility in central Asia (now called the Baikonur Cosmod- rome in the independent republic of Kazakhstan), the Soviet Union used its most powerful ballistic missile (called the R-7) to place the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit around Earth.
Rockets and missiles were no longer only part of the military nuclear arms race; they became an integral part of the game of global politics. During the cold war a superpower’s international prestige was deemed directly proportional to its technical achieve- ments in space. Caught up in this East-West competition, the Cape served as a major technology showcase for Western democracy.
In the late evening (local time) of January 31, 1958, the ground near Launch Complex 26 shook as a hastily modified U.S. Army Juno rocket roared from its pad and successfully inserted the first Ameri- can satellite, called Explorer 1, into orbit around Earth. This effort was the culmination of a joint project of the U.S. Army Ballistic Mis- sile Agency (ABMA) in Huntsville, Alabama, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. Von Braun supervised the rocket team, while James Van Allen of the State University of Iowa provided the instruments that detected the inner of Earth’s two major trapped radiation belts that now bear his name.
As the United States turned its attention to the scientific exploration of outer space, an act of the U.S. Congress formed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)—the civil- ian space agency that opened its doors for business on October 1, 1958. Soon, Cape Canaveral thundered with the sound of military rockets that aerospace engineers had converted from warhead- carrying ballistic missiles to space launch vehicles. While the civil- ian aspects of space exploration and artificial satellite applications made headlines, military satellites—many flown or tested from Cape Canaveral—became an integral part of national defense. For example, the U.S. Air Force launched missile surveillance satellites (first Midas and later Defense Support Program satellites) to guard North America against a surprise ballistic missile attack and to ensure the efficacy of the American strategic nuclear retaliatory policy, called mutually assured destruction (MAD).
Modern post–cold war efforts by the United States and the Russian Federation in nuclear disarmament can trace their heritage to the family of Vela nuclear treaty monitoring satellites that the U.S. Air Force also launched from Cape Canaveral. The successful launch of the first pair of Vela spacecraft encouraged President John F. Kennedy to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) in 1963. This treaty, verified by satellite systems, marked the end of atmo- spheric nuclear weapons testing by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom and represented the beginning of the end of the nuclear arms race that dominated the cold war.
In a magnificent wave of scientific exploration, NASA used the Cape to send progressively more sophisticated robot space- craft to the Moon, around the Sun, and to all of the major planets in our solar system (save tiny Pluto). One epic journey, the Voyager 2 mission, started from Complex 41 when a mighty Titan/Centaur launch vehicle ascended flawlessly into the Florida sky on August 20, 1977. This hardy, robotic explorer conducted a “Grand Tour” mission of all the giant outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune). Then, like its twin (Voyager 1), it departed the solar sys- tem on an interstellar trajectory.
To date, four human-made objects (NASA’s Pioneer 10 and
11 spacecraft and the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft) have achieved