IGY Bulletin, Number 4, October 1957 - The IGY Research Rocket Program

This article is an expansion of the entry in the September 1957 IGY Bulletin which briefly described the Rocket Program in support of the various parts of the IGY's Upper Atmosphere Program. There is a little repetition, but much that is new.

The article starts with a shoutout to Robert Goddard, the American rocket pioneer who was one of the trio of early rocket visionaries, along with Hermann Oberth of Germany and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky of Russia.

In a previous post I showed a Goddard cover from my childhood collection. I recently acquired the one below, a first day cover issued for the same stamp, Scott #C69 (airmail), in 1964. This cover is pretty spaced out! It also includes the following astrophilatelic stamps:

• Fort Bliss rocket range, Scott #976, 1948
• International Geophysical Year, Scott #1107, 1958
• Echo 1 communications satellite, Scott #1173, 1960
• Project Mercury, Scott #1193, 1962

The Fort Bliss stamp was the first U.S. stamp to portray a space vehicle. Fort Bliss, originally built in 1848 because of the Mexican-American War, was where German rocket scientists, including Wernher von Braun, were stationed after they surrendered to (were recruited by?) the U.S. after WWII.

FDC for the Robert Goddard airmail stamp, US 223 in my collection

The article mentions without fanfare that "the International Geophysical Year has seen the first earth satellite, set on orbit by a rocket." That, of course was the Soviet Union's Sputnik, launched the same month as this Bulletin issue, which will be discussed further in an article from the November issue of the Bulletin.

The USNC-IGY rocket program anticipated 194 flights, using five rockets, often with multiple experiments per flight:

• Aerobee - liquid fuel, payload 150 lbs., altitude 60 miles (Karman line)
• Aerobee-Hi - liquid fuel, payload 150 lbs., altitude 150 miles, 42 total Aerobee flights
• Nike-Cajun - two-stage, solid fuel, payload 40 lbs., altitude 100 miles, 53 flights
• Nike-Deacon - two-stage, solid fuel, payload 40 lbs., altitude 75 miles, 14 flights
• Rockoon (portmanteau of rocket and balloon) - Deacon rocket carried to 15 miles by a Skyhook balloon before rocket is fired, payload 40 pounds, altitude 60 miles, 85 flights. Skyhook balloons were developed by General Mills, lord knows for what nefarious purposes.

The Wikipedia articles linked here are hard to resist citing since they seem to be the best references by far.

Here's a contemporary video on how rockoons work. By the way, it seems that sometimes the embedded YouTube videos don't show up well in some platforms for looking at this blog, but the hot links usually do.

Table 1 in the article lists IGY research rocket firings by five different agencies. Launch sites for the US-IGY rocket program were:

• Fort Churchill, Canada
• Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico
• White Sands, New Mexico
• Pt. Mugu, California
• Guam
• from onboard ships

The article summarizes rocket experiments planned in the fields of meteorology, solar activity, airglow, aurora, ionospheric physics, geomagnetism, and cosmic rays, covering seven out of the fourteen IGY areas of study.

I think the Beatles had a song about rockoons: