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A solar spectrograph recorded the absorption pattern of ultraviolet light in the upper atmosphere. The 12th launch, on October 10, 1946, became the first space-science experiment conducted via rocket. The 12th and 13th V-2 rocket launches from White Sands were relative successes, however. “They'd have to send people out in Jeeps in the desert and say, ‘look for a hole roughly over there.’” The first photo of Earth from space

“You’d have radar tracking, which gives you an approximate location of where the impact was, but that's it,” Neufeld says. There was no rocket telemetry in the early days, and certainly no GPS beacon, so even if a camera or instrument survived the fall, it could take a while to find the crater. had no way to recover a payload,” Neufeld says.ĭeveloping parachutes to work with the German-made rockets would take time and money the engineers didn’t have, so “what they did on the early V-2s is essentially put things in armored casings and hope that it would survive being smashed into the ground at several 100 miles per hour,” Neufeld explains. “One of the big challenges was, at that point, the U.S. Navy supported Applied Physics Laboratory and Naval Research Laboratory - began packing V-2s with scientific instruments and cameras and lofting the rockets into the upper atmosphere above New Mexico. Army - working with General Electric and the U.S.

“The V-2 was only the harbinger of what was possible,” DeVorkin says.Īnd so the U.S. National Air and Space Museum Curator Emeritus David DeVorkin tells Inverse that “the early efforts on the American side were to first build a device that could protect us from something like a V-2 and then build our own.” “The V-2 was only the harbinger of what was possible.” Naturally, the United States - and the Soviet Union - captured as many V-2s as they could find and began studying them, flying them, and aiming to improve them. But it was also “obviously a technological breakthrough that could herald a new age of either space vehicle or ballistic missiles,” he adds. “It had been a failure as a weapon because it was a very expensive way to drop a 1-ton bomb on an enemy city,” Neufeld says. A captured German V-2 rocket in White Sands, New Mexico, in 1947.