Escape from Earth by Fraser MacDonald

Escape from Earth by Fraser MacDonald

Author:Fraser MacDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-06-24T16:00:00+00:00


APART FROM BEING the nucleus of a rapidly expanding international spy investigation, everything about Frank’s life was going well. Frank and Marjorie got engaged in November and married on 12 March 1949, the happy news trickling back to the FBI via an intercepted cablegram from the Weinbaums: ‘How perfectly nice. We are happy for you and are sending our best wishes for your very good life together.’ As it turned out, their marriage coincided with another–the German V-2 to JPL’s WAC Corporal. In the absence of the engineers who had inspired it, the BUMPER programme, which had ticked over since late 1946, continued to investigate the feasibility of separation in a multi-stage rocket. Would separation even work at higher velocities and altitudes? Could the materials of the missile skin survive the temperatures of such speeds? Flight testing in the spring and summer of 1948 got off to a good start with BUMPER 1, which, though only partially charged with propellant, successfully demonstrated separation. But BUMPER 2 malfunctioned, BUMPER 3 exploded and BUMPER 4 veered out of control and crashed in the desert. With this kind of record, it’s a bit surprising that BUMPER 5–with a fully tanked WAC Corporal as second stage–got as far as the launch pad.

On 24 February 1949, BUMPER 5 sat in its gantry in White Sands Proving Ground just a few hundred metres from where Malina had tested the WAC Corporal in October 1945. The BUMPER looked like a very different beast. As the crew awaited flight authorisation, the haze from the V-2’s liquid oxygen wreathed the base, giving the scene an infernal atmosphere. The modified WAC second stage appeared as little more than an artist’s pencil balanced on top.

At 3.14 p.m., lift-off.

The first stage went smoothly, and when the V-2 shut down after 64.5 seconds and 18.3 miles, the combined rocket was travelling at 3,600 miles an hour–already faster than Frank’s WAC Corporal flight.13 The second stage WAC separated cleanly and surged into the mesosphere. The sheer power of the V-2’s ‘bump’ gave the WAC an unprecedented momentum as it pushed beyond the extreme cold and into the thermosphere, where oxygen and nitrogen molecules become excited by solar radiation. Two minutes from take-off, and the WAC was reaching 5,150 miles an hour, the first human vehicle to reach Mach 5: hypersonic flight.14 The rocket soared on, passing the point at which an earlier White Sands V-2 had, on 24 October 1946, taken the first photograph of Earth from space. It showed a grainy corner of the planet, wrapped in cloud against the jet black void–not an iconic image, though perhaps it should be, given its radically unfamiliar perspective. It would take time for our species to adjust to this view. But the WAC Corporal from BUMPER 5 was going much, much higher.

Telemetry data–itself untested at this altitude–indicated that the WAC Corporal topped out at 244 miles, by some margin the furthest reach of any human object beyond Earth. It’s an odd, liminal vantage point on



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