Cape Canaveral is a 15 mile strip of sand that is the home of NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Ran by the U.S. Air Force, this launch site of the Space Shuttle is not much more than concrete roads, launch pads, and other buildings.
During the summer of 1950 in the sandbars of Cape Canaveral, Florida, history was made as the bare-bones facility that would one day became the world's busiest spaceport launched its first rockets, a combination of captured German V-2 missiles and high-altitude rockets developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif. At the time, JPL was a U.S. Army lab operated by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. JPL became a NASA lab, still operated by Caltech, when NASA was formed in 1959.
Space veterans will recall the dynamic missile duo that exceeded previous rocket altitudes and velocities and provided important data regarding high-speed and high-altitude phenomena. The rocket pair, consisting of a 4.88-meter-long WAC-B rocket mated to the nose of a 12.8-meter-long V-2 missile, was part of the U.S. Army's Bumper WAC project between 1946 and 1951. The rockets were designed as a two-stage configuration, in which the V-2 missile would rise to its maximum altitude and the WAC-B rocket would tip horizontally and fire, continuing to rise.
With fishermen's cabins transformed into mission control stations and the gantry made of painters' scaffolding, the Army was confident that such a system could deliver a warhead farther than a single-stage vehicle.
After two years and seven trial rounds, July 24, 1950 marked the milestone. With about 50 launch crew members and 20 reporters watching in anticipation, the missile pair successfully lifted off. The V-2 reached a planned altitude of 15,544 meters (51,000 feet) and the WAC-B's spin rockets (used for spin stabilization) ignited, though the main motor did not. The WAC-B rocket reached an estimated 5,000 miles per hour at an altitude of about 40 kilometers (21.8 nautical miles and 350 kilometers (189 nautical miles) down range. Though the WAC's main motor never ignited, the military considered the launch successful.
Five days later, on July 29, 1950, with the refurbished two- stage missile from round 7, "the Cape" successfully launched its second rocket. Flying nine times the speed of sound (Mach 9), this rocket reached the highest velocity attained by a man-made object to date.
Since the first firing, 3,245 launches have occurred at the
Eastern Test Range.
NASA officials breathed a collective sigh of relief after feverishly working to create a plan that successfully unfurled the second of the international space station's giant solar wings.
Energies were then turned to Tuesday's planned spacewalk, during which astronauts Joe Tanner and Carlos Noriega were to continue installing space station Alpha's electricity-producing solar panels.
Tanner and Noriega will make electrical connections so that power from the newly installed solar wings can be distributed to the rest of the station.
The spacewalkers, who installed the panels Sunday, also plan to relocate a communications antenna to the top of the truss that holds the solar wings' batteries and electronics.
The remaining spacewalk tasks will pave the way for the arrival of the American-made Destiny lab module in January.
The unfurling of the second wing was delayed until Monday after the first wing appeared too slack when it was released a day earlier to its entire length of 115 feet in just 13 minutes.
It snapped back and forth as it went out, and two tension cables apparently came off their pulleys, leaving the blanket of solar cells less taut than desired.
NASA officials came up with a start-and-stop unfurling procedure to prevent the same thing from happening to the second wing.
"I know I aged a lot the last 24 hours and I can't afford to age much more," lead flight director Bill Reeves joked after the second wing was successfully spread Monday evening. Both wings are now producing electricity for the space station.
Shuttle commander Brent Jett Jr., using computer commands, carefully unfolded the second wing a few feet at a time in the start-and-stop procedure that took almost two hours. A couple sections stuck together and had to be jarred loose by retracting the panel a little and then shooting it back out.
"There was a fair amount of tension in the cockpit," Tanner said after the second wing was unfurled.
"Needless to say, the room down here was filled with electricity," Mission Control replied.
Reeves said officials are still determining the best way to fix the first solar wing's tension problem, which might include having Tanner and Noriega do repairs during their third spacewalk Thursday. That's when they are set to finish wiring the solar wings and installing other equipment on Alpha.
The main concern is whether the first wing would be secure enough during the docking or undocking of a space shuttle, or during orbit-changing maneuvers. The worry is that vibrations could tear, bend or break off the solar panels.
The future of space station construction hinges on the astronauts' ability to install the solar panels, which will provide much needed power to the newly inhabited outpost.
The $600 million set of solar wings is the largest, most powerful and most expensive ever built for a spacecraft.
They measure 240 feet from tip to tip, including connecting beams, and are 38 feet across. That's longer than the wingspan of a Boeing 777 jetliner.
Alpha commander Bill Shepherd and his two Russian crewmates have been on board since Nov. 2.
The two crews are unable to meet until Friday. The hatches between the two craft remained sealed because of the difference in cabin air pressure.