Page:This New Ocean, a history of Project Mercury, Swenson, Grimwood, Alexander (NASA SP-4201).djvu/36

RV 21 (THE LURE, THE LOCK, THE KEY) States. One, an Air Force project for an intercontinental ramjet-booster rocket combination called the Navaho, took many twists and turns before ending in mid-1957. After 11 years and $680 million, the Air Force, lacking funds for further development, canceled the Navaho enterprise. Technologically, however, Navaho proved a worthwhile investment; its booster-engine configuration, for example, became the basic design later used in various rockets. The two other rocket projects being financed by the military in the early fifties were ultimately successful, both as weapons systems and as space boosters.

After the creation of a separate Air Force in 1947, the Army had continued rocket development, operating on the same assumption behind the German Army's research in the 1930s—that rocketry was basically an extension of artillery. In June 1950, Army Ordnance moved its team of 130 German rocket scientists and engineers from Fort Bliss at El Paso to the Army's Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, Alabama, along with some 800 military and General Electric employees. Headed by Wernher von Braun, who later became chief of the Guided Missile Development Division at Redstone Arsenal, the Army group began design studies on a liquid-fueled battlefield missile called the Hermes C1, a modified V–2. Soon the Huntsville engineers changed the design of the Hermes, which had been planned for a 500-mile range, to a 200-mile rocket capable of high mobility for field deployment. The Rocketdyne Division of North American Aviation modified the Navaho booster engine for the new weapon, and in 1952 the Army bombardment rocket was officially named "Redstone."

Always the favorite of the von Braun group working for the Army, the Redstone was a direct descendant of the V–2. The Redstone's liquid-fueled engine burned alcohol and liquid oxygen and produced about 75,000 pounds of thrust. Nearly 70 feet long and slightly under 6 feet in diameter, the battlefield missile had a speed at burnout, the point of propellant exhaustion, of 3800 miles per hour. For guidance it utilized an all-inertial system featuring a gyroscopically stabilized platform, computers, a programmed flight path taped into the rocket before launch, and the activation of the steering mechanism by signals in flight. For control during powered ascent the Redstone depended on tail fins with movable rudders and refractory carbon vanes mounted in the rocket exhaust. The prime contract for the manufacture of Redstone test rockets went to the Chrysler Corporation. In August 1953 a Redstone fabricated at the Huntsville arsenal made a partially successful maiden flight of only 8000 yards from the military’s missile range at Cape Canaveral, Florida. During the next five years, 37 Redstones were fired to test structure, engine performance, guidance and control, tracking, and telemetry.

The second successful military rocket being developed in 1951 was an Air Force project, the Atlas. The long history of the Atlas, the first American Rh