Flightdeck Friday - On Atlas’ Mighty Shoulders (Part I)
Earlier this week we celebrated the 50th anniversary of John Glenn’s orbital flight, marking our full entry into the space race with the Soviets. Signatory of the mission was our first use of an ICBM to launch Glenn into orbit — the previous missions had been suborbital and used the Redstone missile, itself an SRBM (operational range: 323 km) and not altogether too far removed from the V-2 (as well as a kissing cousin to the SCUD-series SRBMs). Modified SRBMs were all well and good for tossing ‘grapefruits’ (as Krushchev dismissively referred to the Vanguard satellite) into orbit, but to lift a nearly 4,000 lb space capsule (gross launch weight off the Mercury capsule w/escape tower) off the launch pad into orbit would require something much more powerful – and already designed to loft a nuclear warhead and RV weighing over 3,000 lb on a 5,500 mile trajectory as an ICBM. That missile was the SM-65 Atlas (and specifically for Project Mercury, the SM-65D), America’s first ICBM.
Cloudy Beginnings
April 1946 – not even a year since the end of WWII and the after effects are still in play. The post-war, post-colonial era is well underway as Syria declares its independence from France, the League of Nations meets for the last time to dissolve itself and parts of East Prussia are absorbed into Russia. In the US, 400,000 miners go on strike, the Montreal Canadiens beat the Boston Bruins 4-1 for the Stanley Cup and 11 players are named to baseball’s hall of fame. The boys ‘over there’ are very much anxious to be ‘back here’ and make no bones of it and in the Southwest desert of the US, the surviving output of half a decade of war industry begins to line up for the scrappers.
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