04-27-2003, 02:41 PM
|
#3
|
|
Moderator - Science Discussions
Join Date: Feb 2001
Location: Providence, RI, USA
Posts: 9,908
|
A google search on "first rocket" and "space" turned up this:
The first rocket to be launched into space from the Isle of Usedom in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern
Quote:
"We have made our first space shot..."
Said Dr. Walter Dornberger, after giving the order to launch the rocket, which would go down in history as man’s first attempt to explore space.
This historic event took place on the 3rd. October 1942 at 15.40 from the northern point of the Isle of Usedom in east Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
The rocket, launched from "Prüfstand VII" of the military test area in Peenemünde, travelled at 1340 m./sec. to a height of 85 kilometres and came down some 190,5 km. from the Pomeranian coast.
Twelve years of intensive development work had gone into this moment. Work on the trial base had begun in 1936 in Peenemünde on the Isle of Usedom with the buildings, including the launching pad, to make the largest research site in the world.
The aim of the development was for military use and the technicians and scientists had to dedicate their knowledge and skills to the war effort.
The rocket type "Fieseler 103" (the so called reprisal weapon V1) and "Aggregat 4" (the V2) entered the war with dire consequences for the civilian population.
...
The Peenemünde Information Centre now occupies the former bunkers of the power station and original pieces of the A-4 and Fi-103 rockets are exhibited there. A model of the "Prüfstandes VII" shows visitors a detailed layout of the test area and launch pad of the A-4.
There are also documents reminding of the people who were forced to work in Peenemünde such as aliens and concentration camp inmates who perished during the development, building and deployment of this weapons system.
|
Don't know the very first rocket that went into space with a camera, but according to this timeline's 1946 entry:
Quote:
|
On October 24th, a V-2 with a motion picture camera was launched._ It recorded images from 65 miles above the earth, covering 40,000 square miles.
|
And this page says:
Quote:
With the development of the V-2, the rocket had arrived as a booster system capable of launching a meaningful scientific payload into the upper atmosphere. At the end of the war, the United States acquired both production examples of the V-2, as well as members of the German rocket development teams including von Braun. With the German V-2 and the rocket development team, a rocket testing facility was established at the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico, so that we could gain experience in handling and firing ballistic missiles. It was hoped that this experience would lead to improvements in our own rocket technology. In 1946 the United States launched the first of 67 instrumented V-2 rockets from the White Sands range. Over a year later, the first Soviet V-2 roared away from its launch site at Kapustin Yar. Modified V-2s and V-2 spinoffs served as the basis of both the American and Soviet rocket programs as well as being the inspiration in both countries for a new generation of medium-ranged ballistic missiles. Today rocket technology has advanced far beyond the V-2 to the giant boosters that are the work horses of the American, Soviet, and Western European space programs lifting massive payloads into orbit.
As a byproduct, those early V-2 rocket experiments added immeasurable to our knowledge of the little-explored upper atmosphere when interested scientists were invited to take part and conduct experiments in upper atmospheric research and extraterrestrial phenomena. On October 24, 1946, for example, a V-2 rocket carried a small ultraviolet spectrograph to a height of 100 km. During its ascent, a camera made a running record of the never-before photographed near ultraviolet portion of the solar spectrum.
|
Here is a detailed history of the V-2 rocket which suggests that the Oct 24 1946 rocket may have been the first ever launched with a camera, since I don't see any earlier entries about cameras between 1942 and 1946, although some earlier rockets in 1946 carried other equipment like "cosmic radiation experiments". One interesting thing from this timeline is that, from the Feb 21 1946 entry, it seems the team that launched the original rocket into space at Peenemunde in 1942 was brought in to help with the U.S.'s first V-2 program at White Sands, which is where the rocket with the camera was launched from. Here's the entry on that rocket:
Quote:
1946 Oct 24 - LV Configuration: V-2 number 13. Launch Site: White Sands . Launch Complex: LC33.
* V-2 number 13
Launched 12:18 local time. Reached 104.8 km. Carried cosmic and soalr radiaiton, winds, photography experiments for Applied Physics Lab, John Hopkins University. The John Hopkins camera took motion pictures of the earth at over 100 km altitude (pictures covered 100,000 square km.)
|
|
|
|
