Worth a thousand words

It's October 24th, so let's celebrate another space history anniversary.

War as a technology driver is an axiom, and no war seemed to drive technology as much as World War II. The atom was split to defeat Japan, radar technology was mastered to intercept German bombers over Britain, and a host of medical treatments, from antibiotics to skin grafts, were developed to save the lives of soldiers, sailors, and civilians.

Rockets, of course, also made a technological resurgence during World War II. Their absence  from the battlefield (apart from their cousins, the mortars) was due to their ineffectiveness in the War of 1812. Except for being excellent terror weapons (so much so, we turned a song about rockets into our national anthem), rockets did little damage to targets on the ground.

Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket scientists changed all that. Following in the developmental footsteps of American scientist Robert Goddard, von Braun's team created a continuously-improved collection of liquid-fueled missiles in the mid-1930s called the Aggregat series. Aggregat-1 was a 4-foot-tall rocket with a gyroscope in the nose, and incorporated Goddard's turbo-pump ideas to move fuel into the engine. The second group of Aggregat rockets were fully operational and flew in test launches to altitudes over a mile high. The A3 series, although never successfully launched, incorporated both a stabilizing gyroscope, plus two additional "steering" gyroscopes that manipulated thrust vanes placed in the path of the rocket exhaust.

Dr. von Braun, at right, explaining rocketry to his customer base.
"Nazi, Shmatzi," says Wernher von Braun.

Then came the A4, or as the Nazis named it, Vergeltungswaffe 2 (Vengence Weapon 2), or V-2. The V-2 was huge - over 45 feet tall, and capable of carrying a 500-lb. payload 55 miles into the sky, and then hit a target 200 miles away at more than four and a half times the speed of sound. It wasn't very accurate, but the speed and the magnitude of the destruction where it landed was a significant advancement in rocket warfare. By the time World War II ended, three thousand V-2s had killed over seven thousand military and civilians on the ground.

After the war, the United States military snapped up von Braun's rocketeers in Operation Paperclip, shuffling the German rocket scientists off to the desert of White Sands, New Mexico. Here, in what the license plates call the Land of Enchantment, von Braun's scientists were given access to the captured equipment from their V-2 days, and instructed to build follow-on missiles with extended range and payload-carrying abilities.

I thought the V2s were all black-and-white, but many were in yellow jacket color schemes.

Among the captured V-2 equipment were entire, unfired V-2 rockets. The Germans tinkered with the war machines, recalibrating the gyroscopes and aligning the rocket vanes to carry the payloads to higher altitudes.

On October 24th, 1946, the thirteenth post-war V-2 was launched in a near vertical configuration. Inside the nose of the rocket, a 35mm motion picture camera was bolted next to an inspection porthole and aimed perpendicular to the direction of travel. A steel ball bearing in a tube leaned against a lever that sat atop the camera's shutter release. When the engine thrust ceased after 45 seconds, the ball bearing (and everything else in the ship) would experience zero gravity, and would no longer be pressing down on the lever. The shutter clicked at an altitude of 65 miles, and this is the first image created by that action:

High over New Mexico

The camera took another picture every 1.5 seconds for the rest of the trip, as the V-2 coasted up to an altitude of 107.5 miles before falling back to Earth. The ship pranged into the desert floor a few minutes later, destroying the rocket and the camera, but leaving the sturdy frame of the film cassette unscathed.

Before the launch, the most distant photos of Earth were taken from balloons at an altitude of 13 miles. This mission moved that record to an altitude five times the previous height. This photo, showing the curvature of the Earth, and taken from the edge of space, can easily be considered the first photograph of the Space Age.

Through the Per'lous Fight

Good Morning, Baltimore

We've all just been through the 9/11 tenth anniversary weekend, so there's probably quite a bit of patriotism fatigue this Tuesday night. September 13th, though, is the anniversary of another attack on America that we commemorate, but strangely do not remember the date.

198 years ago yesterday, a rocket ship named Erebus arrived in Baltimore Harbor.  No, they didn't have Space Shuttles back then - - it was a British ship of war full of projectiles called Congreve rockets, and they were the state-of-the-art in weaponry during the War of 1812.

Slightly more than a decade previously, the British had taken quite a pasting while battling the natives of Southwestern India. The Indian leader Tipu Sultan invested heavily in his countrymen's latest invention, an ironclad projectile filled with black powder. This first rocket weapon killed British soldiers more than two miles from the rockets' launch sites, and spread a great deal of terror among the Redcoats' rank-and-file.

The British, freaking out over rockets in India.

I mean, holy cow  - here comes a near-silent projectile at 300 mph that bursts into a fog of shrapnel in a 20-yard radius from the impact zone. That's pretty darned scary. The British did two sensible and typically British things: first, they got the hell out of range of Tipu Sultan's rockets, and then they went home to Blighty and built BETTER rockets.

The British Press had a field day with the British retreat.

The guy who built the better rocket was a fellow in the Royal Ordnance division named William Congreve. Congreve figured out how to replicate the Sultan's rocket bodies, but then also figured out a cleaner mix of black powder propellent. The Royal Ordnance metal works cranked out tens of thousands of missile bodies, and the Royal Navy prepared to take on both Napoleon and the puny Americans with these new weapons o' doom.

Congreve's rockets weighed about as much as a bowling ball, and were built with a cylindrical metal body and a pointy (or sometimes knobby) "warhead" section. The rocket bodies were strapped to wooden staves that acted similar to kite tails, stabilizing their flight trajectories and providing a launch platform when stuck in the ground.

Napoleonic WMD

I have no idea what "E" does.

The British also figured out a brilliant tactic in rocket warfare that Tipu Sultan had missed: put a lot of rockets on board a ship, and then drive that ship up and down the enemy's coastline, taking random potshots at beach towns and harbors. The enemy would be as terrorized as the Redcoats were in India a decade or so before.

The plan worked, especially in the British attacks on American cities and towns. Royal Navy sloops, converted into flattop barges called rocket ships, were towed all over the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River. On September 9, 1813, the rocket ship Erebus shelled Alexandra, Virginia, during the land invasion of Washington, DC. Despite strong counterattacks by land-based American cannon batteries, the British managed to capture 22 prize ships in the Potomac River.

The following week, the Erebus joined several other ships in the attack on Baltimore Harbor. The main American defense of the harbor was a pretty substantial star-shaped redoubt called Fort McHenry. The fort's cannon ranges were slightly shy of the Congreve's 2 mile reach, but the cannons were more accurate at extreme range than the rockets - - especially if there were any winds, which tended to make the rockets act like badminton shuttlecocks turning into the wind.

The battle on the night of September 13th lasted all evening, with the British firing an estimated 3,000 rockets at the fort. The result? If you know the song, you already know the answer.

What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
’Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.


The British ceased their attack as dawn approached, and slid down the Chesapeake, away from an unconquered Baltimore.

And the flag? 100 years ago this week it was displayed in downtown Baltimore, and it looked like this:




The failed rocket attack on Ft. McHenry affected American military opinion on rockets being useless as weapons for more than 125 years. More about that when another significant anniversary pops up very soon. Stay tuned!