In the 1950s, The Air Research and Development Command at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico, conducted a series of high-altitude balloon flights to study the effects of cosmic radiation on living tissues. Dr. David Simons, Chief of Space Biology, was in charge of the program. Here's a short excerpt about the experiments from the 1956 book Secrets of Space Flight by Lloyd Mallan.
To keep alive the special laboratory strains of mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits and cats that he sends aloft in the Moby Dick balloons, Dave Simons must follow them almost every mile of their journey. Radio transmitters in the balloon gondola inform him by coded signals of the state of temperature, oxygen supply and pressure being enjoyed or endured by the animals as he flies far below but along with them. Another radio device permits him by remote control to cut loose the animal gondola, which is pressurized to a sea level condition, if leaks develop or temperatures and humidity get too high for the safety of mammals....
But thus far, despite a lack of sleep, he's had more successes than failures. The balloons stay aloft at 100,000 feet for one to three days and this period is long enough to allow the cosmic "bullets" to strike their prey---unlike the chance cosmic ray strikes that occur during the short-duration flights of mammal-carrying rockets. These stay aloft a few minutes only, long enough to test the effects of gravity on animals but not really long enough to expose them effectively to cosmic radiation.
The work of Dave Simons, therefore, has a tremendous value. Thus far, after two years, he has found no evidence of real cell damage to his stratospheric voyagers. The most extreme effect that has been recorded to date is that the hair of black mice have developed streaks of gray, along a path where cosmic particles have destroyed the hair follicles. This is not too serious---but time enough has not yet lapsed for full observation of cellular damage.
---
After achieving acclaim as the discoverer of the then-planet Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh went to work at White Sands Proving Ground in southern New Mexico to help with America's space programs. One of his projects was to search for natural space debris that might damage or doom an eventual spaceflight to the Moon. This excerpt is from the 1956 book Secrets of Space Flight by Lloyd Mallan.
At the White Sands Proving Ground on a desert in New Mexico, Professor Clyde W. Tombaugh is analyzing the results of a program that he initiated: during certain months of the year, he uses a special telescope at Lowell Observatory in Arizona to search the area of space between Earth and the Moon. for the rest of the year, he inspects photographic plates made at Lowell in order to determine the existence and exact orbits of miniature natural moons that may exist in that area. Professor Tombaugh, whose keen eyesight and dedicated thoroughness were responsible for his discovery of the planet Pluto, has designed a new kind of telescope-camera that he and astronomers at Lowell use in the terrestrial-lunar space survey.
"This telescope," he says, "can locate a clean white tennis ball shining in the sunlight a thousand miles out from the Earth." It can also, he adds, locate a comparatively small rocket, such as the V-2 or Viking at a distance of 240,000 miles---which is the approximate distance between the Earth and Moon.
---
On August 16, 1960, Air Force test pilot Joe Kittinger took his final high-altitude balloon flight to test a new parachute system. He stepped out of the balloon gondola at an altitude of 102,800 feet (19.5 miles), above 99.2 percent of the Earth's atmosphere. He landed safely 13 minutes, 45 seconds later. This excerpt is from Kittinger's book Come Up and Get Me.
The third Excelsior flight was planned for the summer of 1960. At that time of year, the winds would be blowing east to west rather than west to east, so we selected a spot outside the little ranch town of Tularosa [New Mexico], due north of Alamogordo, as our launch site. The balloon would drift out over the White Sands Proving Grounds and give us a nice fat landing target. ...
Not only did Excelsior III set the mark for the highest manned balloon flight, but nobody had ever been outside of a pressurized cabin at anything approaching 100,000 feet. We'd shown NASA that a space walk was possible. We'd demonstrated to all our military aircrews that the MC-3 partial-pressure suit was effective in conditions beyond anything most of them would ever experience. My top speed in free fall was measured at 614 miles per hour, on the verge of Mach 1. And we'd done it all for a fraction of what rocket travel was going to cost the nation in the future.
---
This excerpt is from Moon Trip: A Personal Account of the Apollo Program and its Science by Bert King. King was a geologist who helped train astronauts for the scientific work they would be doing on the Moon.
About mid-year we arranged a trip to the Philmont Ranch in New Mexico, another scenic locality with good local logistical support. Jeeps were reserved from a military motor pool, there were comfortable cabins where we could stay, and breakfast and dinner were served in the cafeteria. The ranch was operated as a retreat and summer camp for Boy Scouts. The Philmont personnel were accustomed to catering to large groups, so our party would not strain their facilities. They were genuinely anxious to accommodate us in any way they could....
The geology at Philmont was pretty simple with excellent exposures of igneous and sedimentary rock types. The astronauts oriented themselves on geologic maps, measured and described stratigraphic dons, took strike-and-dip measurements, and recorded lots of field notes under close supervision, I spent most of my time working with Ed White, Jim Lovell, Roger Chaffee, and Al Bean, who were all good students....
Field trips followed to the Bend, Oregon, area and to Valle Grande, near Los Alamos, New Mexico, to study different types of volcanic rocks. Both were excellent study areas, but working in the Valle Grande region was especially strenuous physically.
---
This month's excerpt comes from David Darling's Internet Encyclopedia of Science's entry on Project Stargazer. See the encyclopedia at https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedias1.html.
[The Stargazer Project was] An early balloon-borne project to carry out astronomical studies at very high altitude. It involved only one flight. On Dec. 13-14, 1962, Joseph Kittinger and William White, an astronomer, flew a gondola suspended beneath an 85-meter [280-foot] diameter Mylar balloon to a height of 25,000 m [15,500 mi] over New Mexico. In addition to obtaining telescopic observations from above 95% of Earth's atmosphere, the flight provided valuable data for the development of pressure suits and associated life support systems during a 13-hour stay at the edge of space.
In his book The Pre-Astronauts, Craig Ryan described what happened on an attempted second Stargazer launch:
Kittinger and White were sealed into the pressurized gondola once again in the early morning hours of April 20, 1963. At dawn, only moments before the scheduled launch of Stargazer II, a static-electric charge tripped a release prematurely and freed the helium-filled balloon. The huge Mylar envelope, estimated to be worth $53,000, sped up into the sky and, within a few short minutes, disappeared from sight, leaving two very frustrated men sitting ingloriously in the stratosphere-ready but very earthbound capsule.
---
This excerpt is from UFOs over New Mexico:
Of all the states in the United States, New Mexico has one of the most complex histories of UFO and extraterrestrial encounters. Sightings began as early as 1880. However, it wasn't until the arrival of the Atomic Age in 1945 that UFO activity explodes. Perhaps because of its research into atomics, the state of New Mexico---in some ways perhaps more than any other state---became the focused target of the UFO phenomenon....
The first sightings to gather widespread attention occurred in 1947, when a gigantic UFO super-wave swept across the United States. In New Mexico, much of the activity was concentrated over military and atomic installations. This was also the year of the now-famous Roswell UFO crash, forever putting New Mexico on the front lines of UFO research.
In 1949 and 1950, New Mexico was uniquely targeted by a wave of mysterious green fireballs---causing great concern at high levels of the Air Force.
The 1950s and 1960s brought dozens of "classic cases" including the Farmington UFO display, the Socorro Landing, continuing visitations over White Sands, Holloman AFB, Kirtland AFB and other sensitive installations... . From 1948 to 1965, Project Blue Book investigated scores of New Mexico cases, more than two dozen of which remain unidentified....
New Mexico, although one of the less populated states, ranks well above average in the number of UFO sightings as compared to other states.
---
Between 1993 and 1996, test flights of an experimental, reusable, single-stage-to-orbit, vertical-takeoff-and landing rocket were conducted at White Sands Missile Range. The following excerpt from "Eyewitness to Flight---DC-X" was published in the Summer 1994 issue of The Journal of Practical Applications in Space." In it, a reporter describes the fifth test flight of the first version, the DC-X1.
The actual DC-X test site is three miles from the control trailers [and the viewing stands]. The theory is that even in the worst possible case, pieces won't fly that far, and the practice is that nobody but nobody gets closer than that when the bird [rocket] is flying, not even the pad crew, who spend tests watching form alongside the cars and service trucks lined up by the road, ready to race down to the pad the moment DC-X lands. This isn't like to Good Old Days, when they'd fly V-2s with gaggles of spectators within shouting distance of the launch stand. But then, they had some close calls in the olds days' now they prefer to err on the side of caution....
Right around 8:30 [a.m.], a few people really perked up as we heard "five.. four.. three.. two.. mark!" over the PA, but it was only the control trailer synchronizing clocks with the range....
At T minus three [seconds], the engines were started; there was what looked from that distance like the usual burst of flame from vented pre-cool hydrogen burning off. The first hint of anything unusual was a series of rapid pops over the PA. I really didn't think about it, though; I had a rocket to track, and sure enough, a couple of seconds later there it was in the [camcorder] view finder, a gray blob rising out of the launch smoke. It was at about that point that I started hearing people in the crowd saying something about pieces falling off.
Then we heard and felt a sharp double crack from the direction of the launch stand, and it was obvious something was wrong. I kept tracking the bird, listening to more talk of pieces falling off and not being able to see a thing. Then it seemed that I was tracking downwards sooner than I expected, and the bird was descending into a larger than normal smoke cloud, and the engines cut off, and then as the smoke and dust cleared we heard on the PA "the bird ... the bird is vertical!" as if this were a surprise. Sure enough it was upright---but on open ground, not on its paved landing pad. They had not planned to test the open desert landing capability that day....
Pete Conrad [a former Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab astronaut] came out [of the control room] first; he confirmed that there had been an explosion with considerable damage to the aeroshell, and told us that the vehicle had nevertheless shown as all systems healthy throughout the flight---he didn't hit the autoland to abort the flight until someone told him there's a hole in the side and we need to land!
Lt. Col. Sponable, the project manager, came up next and pointed out that this day's flight had been a success, it just wasn't the success they had planned for today. They hadn't planned to test the autoland routine or the open-ground landing capability anytime soon, but both had worked fine. He also pointed out that there had been another unexpected bonus: Now they knew they had a rocket that could land despite battle damage.
---
This month's excerpt is from American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race by Douglas Brinkley. It refers to post-World War II rocket development in the United States, particularly relating to New Mexico. Note that Robert Goddard had spent the last ten years of his liquid-fuel rocket work in Roswell, New Mexico.
Created by Baltimore's Glenn L. Martin Company (later part of Lockheed Martin) in conjunction with the US Naval Research Laboratory, the Viking was built on the basis of the V-2 but was a distinctly American effort, even incorporating some ideas by the late Robert Goddard. "The US Navy wanted no part of the haughty Germans, no matter how talented they were," wrote historian and NASA veteran Doran Baker. The Viking was developed principally to gather upper atmospheric and ionospheric data that would help predict weather and would communicate via satellites. It would prove a huge boon to America's military and commercial aviation industries in the coming decades. At the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, test launches of the Viking were able to carry research instruments to altitudes of up to 158 miles.
The US Army was continuing its own missile work, relying heavily on German technology and expertise from Fort Bliss. When the Dora-Mittelbau war crimes trial ensued in 1947 at Dachau, the US Army Ordnance Corps made it clear that the von Braun team (the Peenemunders) had eluded any charges. Unscathed by the Dachau trial, in the fall of 1948 von Braun's team began contemplating the development of Earth-orbiting satellites.... Documents from 1949 show that the RAND Corporation had convinced the Pentagon of the satellite's potential for surveillance, reconnaissance, communications, and intimidation, suggesting that the "mere presence in the sky of an artificial satellite would have a strong psychological effect on the potential enemy."
---
This excerpt is from History of Rocketry & Space Travel (Revised Edition) by Wernher von Braun and Frederick I. Ordway III. It refers to Operation Paperclip, in which German rocket scientists and engineers were brought to America after the fall of Nazi Germany in World War II. A large portion of them were based at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, while they conducted their rocket research with Americans at White Sands Proving Ground in southern New Mexico.
The main body of Germans began arriving at Fort Bliss in December 1945, and by February 1946 over a hundred were on hand. They were quartered in converted hospital buildings that gradually became more homelike....
To support the V-2 flights, Army Ordnance contracted for the services of the General Electric Company in what became known as the Hermes program. While the components of the missiles flown in 1946 were completely of German origin, increasing modifications were made from 1947 onward, primarily to accommodate larger and more complex payloads. By 1950 the V-2 rocket had been lengthened by 5 feet, increasing its payload capacity from 16 to 80 cubic feet.
The V-2 program, in addition to giving Americans experience in launching large vehicles, gave valuable information on every aspect of rocket flights and added considerably to infromation about the upper atmosphere. Most of the rockets were flown from White Sands, carrying instruments that measured atmospheric characteristics and the ionosphere. A V-2 carrying atmospheric sounding gear and a biological payload reached an altitude of 116 miles on 17 December 1946. The highest altitude attained was achieved on 22 August 1952, when vehicle TF-1, with no scientific instrumentation, flew to 133 miles above the New Mexico desert.
---
This excerpt is from "Port of Entry: An in-depth look at the history of White Sands Space Harbor," by Wayne Mattson. It was published in the March 2002 issue of New Mexico Space Journal. This portion discusses some of the reasons the airstrip (originally known as Northrup Strip) at White Sands Missile Range was chosen as a back-up landing strip and training facility for space shuttle missions.
Although it had not been chosen for primary [landing site] suty, Northrup Strip did become the site for shuttle pilot training for simulated approaches and landings. The excellent weather of southern New Mexico combined with the military control of surrounding air space (thus preventing potential collisions with civilian aircraft) were irresistable to the NASA planners. But, perhaps the most convincing factor to train at Northrup Strip was the lack of birds in the area. Birds are among the greatest hazards to aircraft. At Cape Canaveral in Florida sea birds are a constant concern, but the White Sands Missile Range lies in the arid Tularosa Basin where the number of birds are limited.
---
These quotes from Wernher von Braun are taken from the Golden Proverbs website. Von Braun worked in New Mexico from 1946 until 1950, improving liquid-fuel rocket development at White Sands Proving Ground.
We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution.
There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program - your tax-dollar will go further.
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft, and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
It would be an error to overlook the possibility that the universe was planned rather than happening by chance.
To keep alive the special laboratory strains of mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits and cats that he sends aloft in the Moby Dick balloons, Dave Simons must follow them almost every mile of their journey. Radio transmitters in the balloon gondola inform him by coded signals of the state of temperature, oxygen supply and pressure being enjoyed or endured by the animals as he flies far below but along with them. Another radio device permits him by remote control to cut loose the animal gondola, which is pressurized to a sea level condition, if leaks develop or temperatures and humidity get too high for the safety of mammals....
But thus far, despite a lack of sleep, he's had more successes than failures. The balloons stay aloft at 100,000 feet for one to three days and this period is long enough to allow the cosmic "bullets" to strike their prey---unlike the chance cosmic ray strikes that occur during the short-duration flights of mammal-carrying rockets. These stay aloft a few minutes only, long enough to test the effects of gravity on animals but not really long enough to expose them effectively to cosmic radiation.
The work of Dave Simons, therefore, has a tremendous value. Thus far, after two years, he has found no evidence of real cell damage to his stratospheric voyagers. The most extreme effect that has been recorded to date is that the hair of black mice have developed streaks of gray, along a path where cosmic particles have destroyed the hair follicles. This is not too serious---but time enough has not yet lapsed for full observation of cellular damage.
---
After achieving acclaim as the discoverer of the then-planet Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh went to work at White Sands Proving Ground in southern New Mexico to help with America's space programs. One of his projects was to search for natural space debris that might damage or doom an eventual spaceflight to the Moon. This excerpt is from the 1956 book Secrets of Space Flight by Lloyd Mallan.
At the White Sands Proving Ground on a desert in New Mexico, Professor Clyde W. Tombaugh is analyzing the results of a program that he initiated: during certain months of the year, he uses a special telescope at Lowell Observatory in Arizona to search the area of space between Earth and the Moon. for the rest of the year, he inspects photographic plates made at Lowell in order to determine the existence and exact orbits of miniature natural moons that may exist in that area. Professor Tombaugh, whose keen eyesight and dedicated thoroughness were responsible for his discovery of the planet Pluto, has designed a new kind of telescope-camera that he and astronomers at Lowell use in the terrestrial-lunar space survey.
"This telescope," he says, "can locate a clean white tennis ball shining in the sunlight a thousand miles out from the Earth." It can also, he adds, locate a comparatively small rocket, such as the V-2 or Viking at a distance of 240,000 miles---which is the approximate distance between the Earth and Moon.
---
On August 16, 1960, Air Force test pilot Joe Kittinger took his final high-altitude balloon flight to test a new parachute system. He stepped out of the balloon gondola at an altitude of 102,800 feet (19.5 miles), above 99.2 percent of the Earth's atmosphere. He landed safely 13 minutes, 45 seconds later. This excerpt is from Kittinger's book Come Up and Get Me.
The third Excelsior flight was planned for the summer of 1960. At that time of year, the winds would be blowing east to west rather than west to east, so we selected a spot outside the little ranch town of Tularosa [New Mexico], due north of Alamogordo, as our launch site. The balloon would drift out over the White Sands Proving Grounds and give us a nice fat landing target. ...
Not only did Excelsior III set the mark for the highest manned balloon flight, but nobody had ever been outside of a pressurized cabin at anything approaching 100,000 feet. We'd shown NASA that a space walk was possible. We'd demonstrated to all our military aircrews that the MC-3 partial-pressure suit was effective in conditions beyond anything most of them would ever experience. My top speed in free fall was measured at 614 miles per hour, on the verge of Mach 1. And we'd done it all for a fraction of what rocket travel was going to cost the nation in the future.
---
This excerpt is from Moon Trip: A Personal Account of the Apollo Program and its Science by Bert King. King was a geologist who helped train astronauts for the scientific work they would be doing on the Moon.
About mid-year we arranged a trip to the Philmont Ranch in New Mexico, another scenic locality with good local logistical support. Jeeps were reserved from a military motor pool, there were comfortable cabins where we could stay, and breakfast and dinner were served in the cafeteria. The ranch was operated as a retreat and summer camp for Boy Scouts. The Philmont personnel were accustomed to catering to large groups, so our party would not strain their facilities. They were genuinely anxious to accommodate us in any way they could....
The geology at Philmont was pretty simple with excellent exposures of igneous and sedimentary rock types. The astronauts oriented themselves on geologic maps, measured and described stratigraphic dons, took strike-and-dip measurements, and recorded lots of field notes under close supervision, I spent most of my time working with Ed White, Jim Lovell, Roger Chaffee, and Al Bean, who were all good students....
Field trips followed to the Bend, Oregon, area and to Valle Grande, near Los Alamos, New Mexico, to study different types of volcanic rocks. Both were excellent study areas, but working in the Valle Grande region was especially strenuous physically.
---
This month's excerpt comes from David Darling's Internet Encyclopedia of Science's entry on Project Stargazer. See the encyclopedia at https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedias1.html.
[The Stargazer Project was] An early balloon-borne project to carry out astronomical studies at very high altitude. It involved only one flight. On Dec. 13-14, 1962, Joseph Kittinger and William White, an astronomer, flew a gondola suspended beneath an 85-meter [280-foot] diameter Mylar balloon to a height of 25,000 m [15,500 mi] over New Mexico. In addition to obtaining telescopic observations from above 95% of Earth's atmosphere, the flight provided valuable data for the development of pressure suits and associated life support systems during a 13-hour stay at the edge of space.
In his book The Pre-Astronauts, Craig Ryan described what happened on an attempted second Stargazer launch:
Kittinger and White were sealed into the pressurized gondola once again in the early morning hours of April 20, 1963. At dawn, only moments before the scheduled launch of Stargazer II, a static-electric charge tripped a release prematurely and freed the helium-filled balloon. The huge Mylar envelope, estimated to be worth $53,000, sped up into the sky and, within a few short minutes, disappeared from sight, leaving two very frustrated men sitting ingloriously in the stratosphere-ready but very earthbound capsule.
---
This excerpt is from UFOs over New Mexico:
Of all the states in the United States, New Mexico has one of the most complex histories of UFO and extraterrestrial encounters. Sightings began as early as 1880. However, it wasn't until the arrival of the Atomic Age in 1945 that UFO activity explodes. Perhaps because of its research into atomics, the state of New Mexico---in some ways perhaps more than any other state---became the focused target of the UFO phenomenon....
The first sightings to gather widespread attention occurred in 1947, when a gigantic UFO super-wave swept across the United States. In New Mexico, much of the activity was concentrated over military and atomic installations. This was also the year of the now-famous Roswell UFO crash, forever putting New Mexico on the front lines of UFO research.
In 1949 and 1950, New Mexico was uniquely targeted by a wave of mysterious green fireballs---causing great concern at high levels of the Air Force.
The 1950s and 1960s brought dozens of "classic cases" including the Farmington UFO display, the Socorro Landing, continuing visitations over White Sands, Holloman AFB, Kirtland AFB and other sensitive installations... . From 1948 to 1965, Project Blue Book investigated scores of New Mexico cases, more than two dozen of which remain unidentified....
New Mexico, although one of the less populated states, ranks well above average in the number of UFO sightings as compared to other states.
---
Between 1993 and 1996, test flights of an experimental, reusable, single-stage-to-orbit, vertical-takeoff-and landing rocket were conducted at White Sands Missile Range. The following excerpt from "Eyewitness to Flight---DC-X" was published in the Summer 1994 issue of The Journal of Practical Applications in Space." In it, a reporter describes the fifth test flight of the first version, the DC-X1.
The actual DC-X test site is three miles from the control trailers [and the viewing stands]. The theory is that even in the worst possible case, pieces won't fly that far, and the practice is that nobody but nobody gets closer than that when the bird [rocket] is flying, not even the pad crew, who spend tests watching form alongside the cars and service trucks lined up by the road, ready to race down to the pad the moment DC-X lands. This isn't like to Good Old Days, when they'd fly V-2s with gaggles of spectators within shouting distance of the launch stand. But then, they had some close calls in the olds days' now they prefer to err on the side of caution....
Right around 8:30 [a.m.], a few people really perked up as we heard "five.. four.. three.. two.. mark!" over the PA, but it was only the control trailer synchronizing clocks with the range....
At T minus three [seconds], the engines were started; there was what looked from that distance like the usual burst of flame from vented pre-cool hydrogen burning off. The first hint of anything unusual was a series of rapid pops over the PA. I really didn't think about it, though; I had a rocket to track, and sure enough, a couple of seconds later there it was in the [camcorder] view finder, a gray blob rising out of the launch smoke. It was at about that point that I started hearing people in the crowd saying something about pieces falling off.
Then we heard and felt a sharp double crack from the direction of the launch stand, and it was obvious something was wrong. I kept tracking the bird, listening to more talk of pieces falling off and not being able to see a thing. Then it seemed that I was tracking downwards sooner than I expected, and the bird was descending into a larger than normal smoke cloud, and the engines cut off, and then as the smoke and dust cleared we heard on the PA "the bird ... the bird is vertical!" as if this were a surprise. Sure enough it was upright---but on open ground, not on its paved landing pad. They had not planned to test the open desert landing capability that day....
Pete Conrad [a former Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab astronaut] came out [of the control room] first; he confirmed that there had been an explosion with considerable damage to the aeroshell, and told us that the vehicle had nevertheless shown as all systems healthy throughout the flight---he didn't hit the autoland to abort the flight until someone told him there's a hole in the side and we need to land!
Lt. Col. Sponable, the project manager, came up next and pointed out that this day's flight had been a success, it just wasn't the success they had planned for today. They hadn't planned to test the autoland routine or the open-ground landing capability anytime soon, but both had worked fine. He also pointed out that there had been another unexpected bonus: Now they knew they had a rocket that could land despite battle damage.
---
This month's excerpt is from American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race by Douglas Brinkley. It refers to post-World War II rocket development in the United States, particularly relating to New Mexico. Note that Robert Goddard had spent the last ten years of his liquid-fuel rocket work in Roswell, New Mexico.
Created by Baltimore's Glenn L. Martin Company (later part of Lockheed Martin) in conjunction with the US Naval Research Laboratory, the Viking was built on the basis of the V-2 but was a distinctly American effort, even incorporating some ideas by the late Robert Goddard. "The US Navy wanted no part of the haughty Germans, no matter how talented they were," wrote historian and NASA veteran Doran Baker. The Viking was developed principally to gather upper atmospheric and ionospheric data that would help predict weather and would communicate via satellites. It would prove a huge boon to America's military and commercial aviation industries in the coming decades. At the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, test launches of the Viking were able to carry research instruments to altitudes of up to 158 miles.
The US Army was continuing its own missile work, relying heavily on German technology and expertise from Fort Bliss. When the Dora-Mittelbau war crimes trial ensued in 1947 at Dachau, the US Army Ordnance Corps made it clear that the von Braun team (the Peenemunders) had eluded any charges. Unscathed by the Dachau trial, in the fall of 1948 von Braun's team began contemplating the development of Earth-orbiting satellites.... Documents from 1949 show that the RAND Corporation had convinced the Pentagon of the satellite's potential for surveillance, reconnaissance, communications, and intimidation, suggesting that the "mere presence in the sky of an artificial satellite would have a strong psychological effect on the potential enemy."
---
This excerpt is from History of Rocketry & Space Travel (Revised Edition) by Wernher von Braun and Frederick I. Ordway III. It refers to Operation Paperclip, in which German rocket scientists and engineers were brought to America after the fall of Nazi Germany in World War II. A large portion of them were based at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, while they conducted their rocket research with Americans at White Sands Proving Ground in southern New Mexico.
The main body of Germans began arriving at Fort Bliss in December 1945, and by February 1946 over a hundred were on hand. They were quartered in converted hospital buildings that gradually became more homelike....
To support the V-2 flights, Army Ordnance contracted for the services of the General Electric Company in what became known as the Hermes program. While the components of the missiles flown in 1946 were completely of German origin, increasing modifications were made from 1947 onward, primarily to accommodate larger and more complex payloads. By 1950 the V-2 rocket had been lengthened by 5 feet, increasing its payload capacity from 16 to 80 cubic feet.
The V-2 program, in addition to giving Americans experience in launching large vehicles, gave valuable information on every aspect of rocket flights and added considerably to infromation about the upper atmosphere. Most of the rockets were flown from White Sands, carrying instruments that measured atmospheric characteristics and the ionosphere. A V-2 carrying atmospheric sounding gear and a biological payload reached an altitude of 116 miles on 17 December 1946. The highest altitude attained was achieved on 22 August 1952, when vehicle TF-1, with no scientific instrumentation, flew to 133 miles above the New Mexico desert.
---
This excerpt is from "Port of Entry: An in-depth look at the history of White Sands Space Harbor," by Wayne Mattson. It was published in the March 2002 issue of New Mexico Space Journal. This portion discusses some of the reasons the airstrip (originally known as Northrup Strip) at White Sands Missile Range was chosen as a back-up landing strip and training facility for space shuttle missions.
Although it had not been chosen for primary [landing site] suty, Northrup Strip did become the site for shuttle pilot training for simulated approaches and landings. The excellent weather of southern New Mexico combined with the military control of surrounding air space (thus preventing potential collisions with civilian aircraft) were irresistable to the NASA planners. But, perhaps the most convincing factor to train at Northrup Strip was the lack of birds in the area. Birds are among the greatest hazards to aircraft. At Cape Canaveral in Florida sea birds are a constant concern, but the White Sands Missile Range lies in the arid Tularosa Basin where the number of birds are limited.
---
These quotes from Wernher von Braun are taken from the Golden Proverbs website. Von Braun worked in New Mexico from 1946 until 1950, improving liquid-fuel rocket development at White Sands Proving Ground.
We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution.
There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program - your tax-dollar will go further.
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft, and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
It would be an error to overlook the possibility that the universe was planned rather than happening by chance.
New Mexico's 2020 Space Voices Archives
2020 Voices Archives
In the 1950s, The Air Research and Development Command at Holloman Air Force Base in Alamogordo, New Mexico, conducted a series of high-altitude balloon flights to study the effects of cosmic radiation on living tissues. Dr. David Simons, Chief of Space Biology, was in charge of the program. Here's a short excerpt about the experiments from the 1956 book Secrets of Space Flight by Lloyd Mallan.
To keep alive the special laboratory strains of mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits and cats that he sends aloft in the Moby Dick balloons, Dave Simons must follow them almost every mile of their journey. Radio transmitters in the balloon gondola inform him by coded signals of the state of temperature, oxygen supply and pressure being enjoyed or endured by the animals as he flies far below but along with them. Another radio device permits him by remote control to cut loose the animal gondola, which is pressurized to a sea level condition, if leaks develop or temperatures and humidity get too high for the safety of mammals....
But thus far, despite a lack of sleep, he's had more successes than failures. The balloons stay aloft at 100,000 feet for one to three days and this period is long enough to allow the cosmic "bullets" to strike their prey---unlike the chance cosmic ray strikes that occur during the short-duration flights of mammal-carrying rockets. These stay aloft a few minutes only, long enough to test the effects of gravity on animals but not really long enough to expose them effectively to cosmic radiation.
The work of Dave Simons, therefore, has a tremendous value. Thus far, after two years, he has found no evidence of real cell damage to his stratospheric voyagers. The most extreme effect that has been recorded to date is that the hair of black mice have developed streaks of gray, along a path where cosmic particles have destroyed the hair follicles. This is not too serious---but time enough has not yet lapsed for full observation of cellular damage.
---
After achieving acclaim as the discoverer of the then-planet Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh went to work at White Sands Proving Ground in southern New Mexico to help with America's space programs. One of his projects was to search for natural space debris that might damage or doom an eventual spaceflight to the Moon. This excerpt is from the 1956 book Secrets of Space Flight by Lloyd Mallan.
At the White Sands Proving Ground on a desert in New Mexico, Professor Clyde W. Tombaugh is analyzing the results of a program that he initiated: during certain months of the year, he uses a special telescope at Lowell Observatory in Arizona to search the area of space between Earth and the Moon. for the rest of the year, he inspects photographic plates made at Lowell in order to determine the existence and exact orbits of miniature natural moons that may exist in that area. Professor Tombaugh, whose keen eyesight and dedicated thoroughness were responsible for his discovery of the planet Pluto, has designed a new kind of telescope-camera that he and astronomers at Lowell use in the terrestrial-lunar space survey.
"This telescope," he says, "can locate a clean white tennis ball shining in the sunlight a thousand miles out from the Earth." It can also, he adds, locate a comparatively small rocket, such as the V-2 or Viking at a distance of 240,000 miles---which is the approximate distance between the Earth and Moon.
---
On August 16, 1960, Air Force test pilot Joe Kittinger took his final high-altitude balloon flight to test a new parachute system. He stepped out of the balloon gondola at an altitude of 102,800 feet (19.5 miles), above 99.2 percent of the Earth's atmosphere. He landed safely 13 minutes, 45 seconds later. This excerpt is from Kittinger's book Come Up and Get Me.
The third Excelsior flight was planned for the summer of 1960. At that time of year, the winds would be blowing east to west rather than west to east, so we selected a spot outside the little ranch town of Tularosa [New Mexico], due north of Alamogordo, as our launch site. The balloon would drift out over the White Sands Proving Grounds and give us a nice fat landing target. ...
Not only did Excelsior III set the mark for the highest manned balloon flight, but nobody had ever been outside of a pressurized cabin at anything approaching 100,000 feet. We'd shown NASA that a space walk was possible. We'd demonstrated to all our military aircrews that the MC-3 partial-pressure suit was effective in conditions beyond anything most of them would ever experience. My top speed in free fall was measured at 614 miles per hour, on the verge of Mach 1. And we'd done it all for a fraction of what rocket travel was going to cost the nation in the future.
---
This excerpt is from Moon Trip: A Personal Account of the Apollo Program and its Science by Bert King. King was a geologist who helped train astronauts for the scientific work they would be doing on the Moon.
About mid-year we arranged a trip to the Philmont Ranch in New Mexico, another scenic locality with good local logistical support. Jeeps were reserved from a military motor pool, there were comfortable cabins where we could stay, and breakfast and dinner were served in the cafeteria. The ranch was operated as a retreat and summer camp for Boy Scouts. The Philmont personnel were accustomed to catering to large groups, so our party would not strain their facilities. They were genuinely anxious to accommodate us in any way they could....
The geology at Philmont was pretty simple with excellent exposures of igneous and sedimentary rock types. The astronauts oriented themselves on geologic maps, measured and described stratigraphic dons, took strike-and-dip measurements, and recorded lots of field notes under close supervision, I spent most of my time working with Ed White, Jim Lovell, Roger Chaffee, and Al Bean, who were all good students....
Field trips followed to the Bend, Oregon, area and to Valle Grande, near Los Alamos, New Mexico, to study different types of volcanic rocks. Both were excellent study areas, but working in the Valle Grande region was especially strenuous physically.
---
This month's excerpt comes from David Darling's Internet Encyclopedia of Science's entry on Project Stargazer. See the encyclopedia at https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedias1.html.
[The Stargazer Project was] An early balloon-borne project to carry out astronomical studies at very high altitude. It involved only one flight. On Dec. 13-14, 1962, Joseph Kittinger and William White, an astronomer, flew a gondola suspended beneath an 85-meter [280-foot] diameter Mylar balloon to a height of 25,000 m [15,500 mi] over New Mexico. In addition to obtaining telescopic observations from above 95% of Earth's atmosphere, the flight provided valuable data for the development of pressure suits and associated life support systems during a 13-hour stay at the edge of space.
In his book The Pre-Astronauts, Craig Ryan described what happened on an attempted second Stargazer launch:
Kittinger and White were sealed into the pressurized gondola once again in the early morning hours of April 20, 1963. At dawn, only moments before the scheduled launch of Stargazer II, a static-electric charge tripped a release prematurely and freed the helium-filled balloon. The huge Mylar envelope, estimated to be worth $53,000, sped up into the sky and, within a few short minutes, disappeared from sight, leaving two very frustrated men sitting ingloriously in the stratosphere-ready but very earthbound capsule.
---
This excerpt is from UFOs over New Mexico:
Of all the states in the United States, New Mexico has one of the most complex histories of UFO and extraterrestrial encounters. Sightings began as early as 1880. However, it wasn't until the arrival of the Atomic Age in 1945 that UFO activity explodes. Perhaps because of its research into atomics, the state of New Mexico---in some ways perhaps more than any other state---became the focused target of the UFO phenomenon....
The first sightings to gather widespread attention occurred in 1947, when a gigantic UFO super-wave swept across the United States. In New Mexico, much of the activity was concentrated over military and atomic installations. This was also the year of the now-famous Roswell UFO crash, forever putting New Mexico on the front lines of UFO research.
In 1949 and 1950, New Mexico was uniquely targeted by a wave of mysterious green fireballs---causing great concern at high levels of the Air Force.
The 1950s and 1960s brought dozens of "classic cases" including the Farmington UFO display, the Socorro Landing, continuing visitations over White Sands, Holloman AFB, Kirtland AFB and other sensitive installations... . From 1948 to 1965, Project Blue Book investigated scores of New Mexico cases, more than two dozen of which remain unidentified....
New Mexico, although one of the less populated states, ranks well above average in the number of UFO sightings as compared to other states.
---
Between 1993 and 1996, test flights of an experimental, reusable, single-stage-to-orbit, vertical-takeoff-and landing rocket were conducted at White Sands Missile Range. The following excerpt from "Eyewitness to Flight---DC-X" was published in the Summer 1994 issue of The Journal of Practical Applications in Space." In it, a reporter describes the fifth test flight of the first version, the DC-X1.
The actual DC-X test site is three miles from the control trailers [and the viewing stands]. The theory is that even in the worst possible case, pieces won't fly that far, and the practice is that nobody but nobody gets closer than that when the bird [rocket] is flying, not even the pad crew, who spend tests watching form alongside the cars and service trucks lined up by the road, ready to race down to the pad the moment DC-X lands. This isn't like to Good Old Days, when they'd fly V-2s with gaggles of spectators within shouting distance of the launch stand. But then, they had some close calls in the olds days' now they prefer to err on the side of caution....
Right around 8:30 [a.m.], a few people really perked up as we heard "five.. four.. three.. two.. mark!" over the PA, but it was only the control trailer synchronizing clocks with the range....
At T minus three [seconds], the engines were started; there was what looked from that distance like the usual burst of flame from vented pre-cool hydrogen burning off. The first hint of anything unusual was a series of rapid pops over the PA. I really didn't think about it, though; I had a rocket to track, and sure enough, a couple of seconds later there it was in the [camcorder] view finder, a gray blob rising out of the launch smoke. It was at about that point that I started hearing people in the crowd saying something about pieces falling off.
Then we heard and felt a sharp double crack from the direction of the launch stand, and it was obvious something was wrong. I kept tracking the bird, listening to more talk of pieces falling off and not being able to see a thing. Then it seemed that I was tracking downwards sooner than I expected, and the bird was descending into a larger than normal smoke cloud, and the engines cut off, and then as the smoke and dust cleared we heard on the PA "the bird ... the bird is vertical!" as if this were a surprise. Sure enough it was upright---but on open ground, not on its paved landing pad. They had not planned to test the open desert landing capability that day....
Pete Conrad [a former Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab astronaut] came out [of the control room] first; he confirmed that there had been an explosion with considerable damage to the aeroshell, and told us that the vehicle had nevertheless shown as all systems healthy throughout the flight---he didn't hit the autoland to abort the flight until someone told him there's a hole in the side and we need to land!
Lt. Col. Sponable, the project manager, came up next and pointed out that this day's flight had been a success, it just wasn't the success they had planned for today. They hadn't planned to test the autoland routine or the open-ground landing capability anytime soon, but both had worked fine. He also pointed out that there had been another unexpected bonus: Now they knew they had a rocket that could land despite battle damage.
---
This month's excerpt is from American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race by Douglas Brinkley. It refers to post-World War II rocket development in the United States, particularly relating to New Mexico. Note that Robert Goddard had spent the last ten years of his liquid-fuel rocket work in Roswell, New Mexico.
Created by Baltimore's Glenn L. Martin Company (later part of Lockheed Martin) in conjunction with the US Naval Research Laboratory, the Viking was built on the basis of the V-2 but was a distinctly American effort, even incorporating some ideas by the late Robert Goddard. "The US Navy wanted no part of the haughty Germans, no matter how talented they were," wrote historian and NASA veteran Doran Baker. The Viking was developed principally to gather upper atmospheric and ionospheric data that would help predict weather and would communicate via satellites. It would prove a huge boon to America's military and commercial aviation industries in the coming decades. At the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, test launches of the Viking were able to carry research instruments to altitudes of up to 158 miles.
The US Army was continuing its own missile work, relying heavily on German technology and expertise from Fort Bliss. When the Dora-Mittelbau war crimes trial ensued in 1947 at Dachau, the US Army Ordnance Corps made it clear that the von Braun team (the Peenemunders) had eluded any charges. Unscathed by the Dachau trial, in the fall of 1948 von Braun's team began contemplating the development of Earth-orbiting satellites.... Documents from 1949 show that the RAND Corporation had convinced the Pentagon of the satellite's potential for surveillance, reconnaissance, communications, and intimidation, suggesting that the "mere presence in the sky of an artificial satellite would have a strong psychological effect on the potential enemy."
---
This excerpt is from History of Rocketry & Space Travel (Revised Edition) by Wernher von Braun and Frederick I. Ordway III. It refers to Operation Paperclip, in which German rocket scientists and engineers were brought to America after the fall of Nazi Germany in World War II. A large portion of them were based at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, while they conducted their rocket research with Americans at White Sands Proving Ground in southern New Mexico.
The main body of Germans began arriving at Fort Bliss in December 1945, and by February 1946 over a hundred were on hand. They were quartered in converted hospital buildings that gradually became more homelike....
To support the V-2 flights, Army Ordnance contracted for the services of the General Electric Company in what became known as the Hermes program. While the components of the missiles flown in 1946 were completely of German origin, increasing modifications were made from 1947 onward, primarily to accommodate larger and more complex payloads. By 1950 the V-2 rocket had been lengthened by 5 feet, increasing its payload capacity from 16 to 80 cubic feet.
The V-2 program, in addition to giving Americans experience in launching large vehicles, gave valuable information on every aspect of rocket flights and added considerably to infromation about the upper atmosphere. Most of the rockets were flown from White Sands, carrying instruments that measured atmospheric characteristics and the ionosphere. A V-2 carrying atmospheric sounding gear and a biological payload reached an altitude of 116 miles on 17 December 1946. The highest altitude attained was achieved on 22 August 1952, when vehicle TF-1, with no scientific instrumentation, flew to 133 miles above the New Mexico desert.
---
This excerpt is from "Port of Entry: An in-depth look at the history of White Sands Space Harbor," by Wayne Mattson. It was published in the March 2002 issue of New Mexico Space Journal. This portion discusses some of the reasons the airstrip (originally known as Northrup Strip) at White Sands Missile Range was chosen as a back-up landing strip and training facility for space shuttle missions.
Although it had not been chosen for primary [landing site] suty, Northrup Strip did become the site for shuttle pilot training for simulated approaches and landings. The excellent weather of southern New Mexico combined with the military control of surrounding air space (thus preventing potential collisions with civilian aircraft) were irresistable to the NASA planners. But, perhaps the most convincing factor to train at Northrup Strip was the lack of birds in the area. Birds are among the greatest hazards to aircraft. At Cape Canaveral in Florida sea birds are a constant concern, but the White Sands Missile Range lies in the arid Tularosa Basin where the number of birds are limited.
---
These quotes from Wernher von Braun are taken from the Golden Proverbs website. Von Braun worked in New Mexico from 1946 until 1950, improving liquid-fuel rocket development at White Sands Proving Ground.
We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution.
There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program - your tax-dollar will go further.
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft, and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
It would be an error to overlook the possibility that the universe was planned rather than happening by chance.
To keep alive the special laboratory strains of mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits and cats that he sends aloft in the Moby Dick balloons, Dave Simons must follow them almost every mile of their journey. Radio transmitters in the balloon gondola inform him by coded signals of the state of temperature, oxygen supply and pressure being enjoyed or endured by the animals as he flies far below but along with them. Another radio device permits him by remote control to cut loose the animal gondola, which is pressurized to a sea level condition, if leaks develop or temperatures and humidity get too high for the safety of mammals....
But thus far, despite a lack of sleep, he's had more successes than failures. The balloons stay aloft at 100,000 feet for one to three days and this period is long enough to allow the cosmic "bullets" to strike their prey---unlike the chance cosmic ray strikes that occur during the short-duration flights of mammal-carrying rockets. These stay aloft a few minutes only, long enough to test the effects of gravity on animals but not really long enough to expose them effectively to cosmic radiation.
The work of Dave Simons, therefore, has a tremendous value. Thus far, after two years, he has found no evidence of real cell damage to his stratospheric voyagers. The most extreme effect that has been recorded to date is that the hair of black mice have developed streaks of gray, along a path where cosmic particles have destroyed the hair follicles. This is not too serious---but time enough has not yet lapsed for full observation of cellular damage.
---
After achieving acclaim as the discoverer of the then-planet Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh went to work at White Sands Proving Ground in southern New Mexico to help with America's space programs. One of his projects was to search for natural space debris that might damage or doom an eventual spaceflight to the Moon. This excerpt is from the 1956 book Secrets of Space Flight by Lloyd Mallan.
At the White Sands Proving Ground on a desert in New Mexico, Professor Clyde W. Tombaugh is analyzing the results of a program that he initiated: during certain months of the year, he uses a special telescope at Lowell Observatory in Arizona to search the area of space between Earth and the Moon. for the rest of the year, he inspects photographic plates made at Lowell in order to determine the existence and exact orbits of miniature natural moons that may exist in that area. Professor Tombaugh, whose keen eyesight and dedicated thoroughness were responsible for his discovery of the planet Pluto, has designed a new kind of telescope-camera that he and astronomers at Lowell use in the terrestrial-lunar space survey.
"This telescope," he says, "can locate a clean white tennis ball shining in the sunlight a thousand miles out from the Earth." It can also, he adds, locate a comparatively small rocket, such as the V-2 or Viking at a distance of 240,000 miles---which is the approximate distance between the Earth and Moon.
---
On August 16, 1960, Air Force test pilot Joe Kittinger took his final high-altitude balloon flight to test a new parachute system. He stepped out of the balloon gondola at an altitude of 102,800 feet (19.5 miles), above 99.2 percent of the Earth's atmosphere. He landed safely 13 minutes, 45 seconds later. This excerpt is from Kittinger's book Come Up and Get Me.
The third Excelsior flight was planned for the summer of 1960. At that time of year, the winds would be blowing east to west rather than west to east, so we selected a spot outside the little ranch town of Tularosa [New Mexico], due north of Alamogordo, as our launch site. The balloon would drift out over the White Sands Proving Grounds and give us a nice fat landing target. ...
Not only did Excelsior III set the mark for the highest manned balloon flight, but nobody had ever been outside of a pressurized cabin at anything approaching 100,000 feet. We'd shown NASA that a space walk was possible. We'd demonstrated to all our military aircrews that the MC-3 partial-pressure suit was effective in conditions beyond anything most of them would ever experience. My top speed in free fall was measured at 614 miles per hour, on the verge of Mach 1. And we'd done it all for a fraction of what rocket travel was going to cost the nation in the future.
---
This excerpt is from Moon Trip: A Personal Account of the Apollo Program and its Science by Bert King. King was a geologist who helped train astronauts for the scientific work they would be doing on the Moon.
About mid-year we arranged a trip to the Philmont Ranch in New Mexico, another scenic locality with good local logistical support. Jeeps were reserved from a military motor pool, there were comfortable cabins where we could stay, and breakfast and dinner were served in the cafeteria. The ranch was operated as a retreat and summer camp for Boy Scouts. The Philmont personnel were accustomed to catering to large groups, so our party would not strain their facilities. They were genuinely anxious to accommodate us in any way they could....
The geology at Philmont was pretty simple with excellent exposures of igneous and sedimentary rock types. The astronauts oriented themselves on geologic maps, measured and described stratigraphic dons, took strike-and-dip measurements, and recorded lots of field notes under close supervision, I spent most of my time working with Ed White, Jim Lovell, Roger Chaffee, and Al Bean, who were all good students....
Field trips followed to the Bend, Oregon, area and to Valle Grande, near Los Alamos, New Mexico, to study different types of volcanic rocks. Both were excellent study areas, but working in the Valle Grande region was especially strenuous physically.
---
This month's excerpt comes from David Darling's Internet Encyclopedia of Science's entry on Project Stargazer. See the encyclopedia at https://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedias1.html.
[The Stargazer Project was] An early balloon-borne project to carry out astronomical studies at very high altitude. It involved only one flight. On Dec. 13-14, 1962, Joseph Kittinger and William White, an astronomer, flew a gondola suspended beneath an 85-meter [280-foot] diameter Mylar balloon to a height of 25,000 m [15,500 mi] over New Mexico. In addition to obtaining telescopic observations from above 95% of Earth's atmosphere, the flight provided valuable data for the development of pressure suits and associated life support systems during a 13-hour stay at the edge of space.
In his book The Pre-Astronauts, Craig Ryan described what happened on an attempted second Stargazer launch:
Kittinger and White were sealed into the pressurized gondola once again in the early morning hours of April 20, 1963. At dawn, only moments before the scheduled launch of Stargazer II, a static-electric charge tripped a release prematurely and freed the helium-filled balloon. The huge Mylar envelope, estimated to be worth $53,000, sped up into the sky and, within a few short minutes, disappeared from sight, leaving two very frustrated men sitting ingloriously in the stratosphere-ready but very earthbound capsule.
---
This excerpt is from UFOs over New Mexico:
Of all the states in the United States, New Mexico has one of the most complex histories of UFO and extraterrestrial encounters. Sightings began as early as 1880. However, it wasn't until the arrival of the Atomic Age in 1945 that UFO activity explodes. Perhaps because of its research into atomics, the state of New Mexico---in some ways perhaps more than any other state---became the focused target of the UFO phenomenon....
The first sightings to gather widespread attention occurred in 1947, when a gigantic UFO super-wave swept across the United States. In New Mexico, much of the activity was concentrated over military and atomic installations. This was also the year of the now-famous Roswell UFO crash, forever putting New Mexico on the front lines of UFO research.
In 1949 and 1950, New Mexico was uniquely targeted by a wave of mysterious green fireballs---causing great concern at high levels of the Air Force.
The 1950s and 1960s brought dozens of "classic cases" including the Farmington UFO display, the Socorro Landing, continuing visitations over White Sands, Holloman AFB, Kirtland AFB and other sensitive installations... . From 1948 to 1965, Project Blue Book investigated scores of New Mexico cases, more than two dozen of which remain unidentified....
New Mexico, although one of the less populated states, ranks well above average in the number of UFO sightings as compared to other states.
---
Between 1993 and 1996, test flights of an experimental, reusable, single-stage-to-orbit, vertical-takeoff-and landing rocket were conducted at White Sands Missile Range. The following excerpt from "Eyewitness to Flight---DC-X" was published in the Summer 1994 issue of The Journal of Practical Applications in Space." In it, a reporter describes the fifth test flight of the first version, the DC-X1.
The actual DC-X test site is three miles from the control trailers [and the viewing stands]. The theory is that even in the worst possible case, pieces won't fly that far, and the practice is that nobody but nobody gets closer than that when the bird [rocket] is flying, not even the pad crew, who spend tests watching form alongside the cars and service trucks lined up by the road, ready to race down to the pad the moment DC-X lands. This isn't like to Good Old Days, when they'd fly V-2s with gaggles of spectators within shouting distance of the launch stand. But then, they had some close calls in the olds days' now they prefer to err on the side of caution....
Right around 8:30 [a.m.], a few people really perked up as we heard "five.. four.. three.. two.. mark!" over the PA, but it was only the control trailer synchronizing clocks with the range....
At T minus three [seconds], the engines were started; there was what looked from that distance like the usual burst of flame from vented pre-cool hydrogen burning off. The first hint of anything unusual was a series of rapid pops over the PA. I really didn't think about it, though; I had a rocket to track, and sure enough, a couple of seconds later there it was in the [camcorder] view finder, a gray blob rising out of the launch smoke. It was at about that point that I started hearing people in the crowd saying something about pieces falling off.
Then we heard and felt a sharp double crack from the direction of the launch stand, and it was obvious something was wrong. I kept tracking the bird, listening to more talk of pieces falling off and not being able to see a thing. Then it seemed that I was tracking downwards sooner than I expected, and the bird was descending into a larger than normal smoke cloud, and the engines cut off, and then as the smoke and dust cleared we heard on the PA "the bird ... the bird is vertical!" as if this were a surprise. Sure enough it was upright---but on open ground, not on its paved landing pad. They had not planned to test the open desert landing capability that day....
Pete Conrad [a former Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab astronaut] came out [of the control room] first; he confirmed that there had been an explosion with considerable damage to the aeroshell, and told us that the vehicle had nevertheless shown as all systems healthy throughout the flight---he didn't hit the autoland to abort the flight until someone told him there's a hole in the side and we need to land!
Lt. Col. Sponable, the project manager, came up next and pointed out that this day's flight had been a success, it just wasn't the success they had planned for today. They hadn't planned to test the autoland routine or the open-ground landing capability anytime soon, but both had worked fine. He also pointed out that there had been another unexpected bonus: Now they knew they had a rocket that could land despite battle damage.
---
This month's excerpt is from American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race by Douglas Brinkley. It refers to post-World War II rocket development in the United States, particularly relating to New Mexico. Note that Robert Goddard had spent the last ten years of his liquid-fuel rocket work in Roswell, New Mexico.
Created by Baltimore's Glenn L. Martin Company (later part of Lockheed Martin) in conjunction with the US Naval Research Laboratory, the Viking was built on the basis of the V-2 but was a distinctly American effort, even incorporating some ideas by the late Robert Goddard. "The US Navy wanted no part of the haughty Germans, no matter how talented they were," wrote historian and NASA veteran Doran Baker. The Viking was developed principally to gather upper atmospheric and ionospheric data that would help predict weather and would communicate via satellites. It would prove a huge boon to America's military and commercial aviation industries in the coming decades. At the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, test launches of the Viking were able to carry research instruments to altitudes of up to 158 miles.
The US Army was continuing its own missile work, relying heavily on German technology and expertise from Fort Bliss. When the Dora-Mittelbau war crimes trial ensued in 1947 at Dachau, the US Army Ordnance Corps made it clear that the von Braun team (the Peenemunders) had eluded any charges. Unscathed by the Dachau trial, in the fall of 1948 von Braun's team began contemplating the development of Earth-orbiting satellites.... Documents from 1949 show that the RAND Corporation had convinced the Pentagon of the satellite's potential for surveillance, reconnaissance, communications, and intimidation, suggesting that the "mere presence in the sky of an artificial satellite would have a strong psychological effect on the potential enemy."
---
This excerpt is from History of Rocketry & Space Travel (Revised Edition) by Wernher von Braun and Frederick I. Ordway III. It refers to Operation Paperclip, in which German rocket scientists and engineers were brought to America after the fall of Nazi Germany in World War II. A large portion of them were based at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, while they conducted their rocket research with Americans at White Sands Proving Ground in southern New Mexico.
The main body of Germans began arriving at Fort Bliss in December 1945, and by February 1946 over a hundred were on hand. They were quartered in converted hospital buildings that gradually became more homelike....
To support the V-2 flights, Army Ordnance contracted for the services of the General Electric Company in what became known as the Hermes program. While the components of the missiles flown in 1946 were completely of German origin, increasing modifications were made from 1947 onward, primarily to accommodate larger and more complex payloads. By 1950 the V-2 rocket had been lengthened by 5 feet, increasing its payload capacity from 16 to 80 cubic feet.
The V-2 program, in addition to giving Americans experience in launching large vehicles, gave valuable information on every aspect of rocket flights and added considerably to infromation about the upper atmosphere. Most of the rockets were flown from White Sands, carrying instruments that measured atmospheric characteristics and the ionosphere. A V-2 carrying atmospheric sounding gear and a biological payload reached an altitude of 116 miles on 17 December 1946. The highest altitude attained was achieved on 22 August 1952, when vehicle TF-1, with no scientific instrumentation, flew to 133 miles above the New Mexico desert.
---
This excerpt is from "Port of Entry: An in-depth look at the history of White Sands Space Harbor," by Wayne Mattson. It was published in the March 2002 issue of New Mexico Space Journal. This portion discusses some of the reasons the airstrip (originally known as Northrup Strip) at White Sands Missile Range was chosen as a back-up landing strip and training facility for space shuttle missions.
Although it had not been chosen for primary [landing site] suty, Northrup Strip did become the site for shuttle pilot training for simulated approaches and landings. The excellent weather of southern New Mexico combined with the military control of surrounding air space (thus preventing potential collisions with civilian aircraft) were irresistable to the NASA planners. But, perhaps the most convincing factor to train at Northrup Strip was the lack of birds in the area. Birds are among the greatest hazards to aircraft. At Cape Canaveral in Florida sea birds are a constant concern, but the White Sands Missile Range lies in the arid Tularosa Basin where the number of birds are limited.
---
These quotes from Wernher von Braun are taken from the Golden Proverbs website. Von Braun worked in New Mexico from 1946 until 1950, improving liquid-fuel rocket development at White Sands Proving Ground.
We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution.
There is just one thing I can promise you about the outer-space program - your tax-dollar will go further.
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft, and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
It would be an error to overlook the possibility that the universe was planned rather than happening by chance.
Photo Credits
Robert Goddard towing one of his rockets to the launch site near Roswell about 1931, courtesy of NASA.
WhiteKnightTwo carrying SpaceShipTwo at Spaceport America runway dedication flyover, photo by Loretta Hall.
Unless otherwise credited, all material on this site is © Loretta Hall 2010-2020.
Robert Goddard towing one of his rockets to the launch site near Roswell about 1931, courtesy of NASA.
WhiteKnightTwo carrying SpaceShipTwo at Spaceport America runway dedication flyover, photo by Loretta Hall.
Unless otherwise credited, all material on this site is © Loretta Hall 2010-2020.
Photo Credits
Robert Goddard towing one of his rockets to the launch site near Roswell about 1931, courtesy of NASA.
WhiteKnightTwo carrying SpaceShipTwo at Spaceport America runway dedication flyover, photo by Loretta Hall.
Robert Goddard towing one of his rockets to the launch site near Roswell about 1931, courtesy of NASA.
WhiteKnightTwo carrying SpaceShipTwo at Spaceport America runway dedication flyover, photo by Loretta Hall.
Unless otherwise credited, all material on this site is © Loretta Hall 2010-2020.