Page:This New Ocean, a history of Project Mercury, Swenson, Grimwood, Alexander (NASA SP-4201).djvu/34

THE LURE, THE LOCK, THE KEY the Truman administration and Congress listened to conservative military men and civilian scientists who felt that until at least 1965 manned bombers, supplemented by air-breathing guided missiles evolving from the German V–1, should be the principal American "deterrent force." Just after the war former NACA Chairman Bush, then Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, had expressed the prevailing mood in a much-quoted (and perhaps much- regretted) piece of testimony before a Congressional committee: "There has been a great deal said about a 3000-mile high-angle rocket. In my opinion, such a thing is impossible today and will be impossible for many years… I wish the American public would leave that out of their thinking."

The United States developed guided missiles for air-to-air, air-to-surface, and surface-to-air interception uses and as tactical surface-to-surface weapons. Rocket motors, using both liquid and solid fuels, gradually replaced jet propulsion systems, but short-range defensive missiles remained advanced enough for most tastes until the late 1950s.

As for scientific research in the upper atmosphere, the backlog of V–2s put together by the United States Army from captured components would do in the early postwar years. From April 1946 to October 1951, 66 V–2s were fired at the Army's White Sands Proving Grounds, New Mexico, in the most extensive rocket and upper-atmospheric research program to that time. The Army Ordnance Department, the Air Force, the Air Force Cambridge Research Center, the General Electric Company, various scientific institutions, universities, and government agencies, and the Naval Research Laboratory participated in the White Sands V–2 program. Virtually all the rockets were heavily instrumented, and many of them carried plant life and animals. V–2s carried monkeys aloft on four occasions; telemetry data transmitted from the rockets showed no ill effects on the primates until each was killed in the crash. The most memorable launching at White Sands, however, came on February 24, 1949, when a V–2 boosted a WAC Corporal rocket developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory 244 miles into space and to a speed of 5510 miles per hour, the greatest altitude and velocity yet attained by a man-made object. A year and a half later, a V–2—WAC Corporal combination rose from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in the first launch at the Air Force’s newly activated Long Range Proving Ground.

By the late forties, with the supply of V–2s rapidly disappearing, work had begun on more reliable and efficient research rockets. The most durable of these indigenous projectiles proved to be the Aerobee, designed as a sounding rocket by the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University and financed by the Office of Naval Research. With a peak altitude of about 80 miles, the Aerobee served as a reliable tool for upper-atmospheric research until the late 1950s. The Naval Research Laboratory designed the Viking, a long, slim high-altitude sounding rocket, manufactured by the Glenn L. Martin Company of Baltimore. In August 1951 the Viking bettered its own altitude record for a single-stage rocket, reaching 136 miles from a White Sands launch. In the fifties, Rh