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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico—April 16, 1946. Van Allen had a cosmic ray experiment ready to fly on thefirstV-2rocketlaunch,scheduledforApril16,1946,atWhite Sands Proving Ground (now White Sands Missile Range) in New Mexico. The APL group headed there by train and loaded instruments in the baggage compartment where sensitive electronics rattled across 3,000 miles of track to El Paso, Texas. An army truck picked up the group and took them on another bumpy ride through the desert to the primitive base at White Sands. Van Allen bunked with the other scientists in hastily constructed barracks and worked in the makeshift rocket assembly building. The spartan accommodations, long hours, and pitiless heat indoors wilted spirits but couldn’t dull the excitement and the promise of new discoveries. TheV-2rocketgleamedfour-storieshighinthesunonApril 16, a surreal monolith dwarfing the ridges of the distant San Andreas Mountains. Van Allen climbed a ladder hydraulically raised against the sides of the rocket while German physicist Ernst Stuhlinger scaled a second ladder and unscrewed the door to the nose cone. They rechecked the instrument wiring and battery connections. All the other rocket systems had to be rechecked as well and then launch preparations hit full gear. A favorable weather report cleared the rocket for fueling with kerosene and liquid oxygen. Plumes of gas clouded therocketastricklesofoxygenescapedtotheair.Fuelingtook ninety minutes and nearly tripled the 9-ton weight of the rocket and payload. At about 2 P.M., forty-seven minutes prior to launch, the German team, the scientists, and army personnel headed into acementblockbunkerwith10-footthickwallsandapyramidshaped roof designed to withstand a direct hit by a wayward rocket.Thescientistsgatheredattwoslitsinthewallstowatch The Dawn of Space Exploration 6 the launch 350 feet away. At 2:15 P.M., base personnel closed off the proving ground with roadblocks and cleared roads and parking areas of vehicles. Ten minutes before firing, a red flair that could be seen throughout the area gave warning of the launch. Two minutes before firing, the post siren blared a final alarm. Then Van Allen heard the countdown from behind him in the blockhouse and, at 2:47 P.M., German electrician Ian Werner Rosinski fired the rocket. The V-2 blasted into the air, rising to a maximum speed of 5,600 feet per second with a fire bolt of exhaust cutting through the sky. Inside the nose cone, APL’s counters streaked toward a new scientific horizon. Then, just seconds later, the rocket veered off course on a trajectory that targeteditbeyondtheprovingground.WernhervonBraun,mastermindofthe V-2, aborted the flight from the bunker with a radio-triggered fuel cutoff. Nineteen seconds after takeoff, the rocket tumbled to the ground, exploding intoacraterofcrushedmetal,meltedinstruments,andblazingfuel.VonBraun 76 The Dawn of Space Exploration “The Earth from 65 Miles Up,” title of the first photo of Earth taken from space with an APL 35mm motion-picture camera developed by APL engineer Clyde Holliday and launched in a V-2 rocket on October 24, 1946. Courtesy of the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University. and his team had seen the misfires before—dozens of times. But the forced crash was a devastating blow for the APL physicists who watched months of work go up in smoke. They had built a new generation of experiments hearty enough to stand up to a rocket launch. Nothing they constructed could survive the crash. Most physicists and astronomers steered clear of such unpredictableoperationsbutVanAllenandthehandfulofmavericksatWhiteSands shrugged off the disappointments and just built more instruments to take the first steps into space exploration. • • • “Most people say space exploration began on October 4, 1957, with the launch ofSputnikbutit’smuchearlier,frommypointofview.ItstartedatWhiteSands with the V-2s,” Van Allen often said. Little more than a year after the German V-2 rockets terrorized London and Antwerp, the U.S. Army transplanted them to New Mexico for reassembly and testing as part of America’s own fledgling missile program. The army’s top secret Operation Paperclip brought the Nazi rocket engineers to the United States as well and settled them at Fort Bliss in Texas. The military testing program undertaken at nearby White Sands didn’t require warheads in the nose cones, so the army invited scientists to fly cosmic ray detectors and other equipment in them instead. Scientists from institutions interested in this new mobile laboratory gathered at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., on January 16, 1946, and formed the V-2 Panel, later called the Upper Atmosphere Rocket Research Panel, and later still, the Rocket and Satellite Research...

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