At the end of World War II, Cape Canaveral was a quiet, sleepy place. The fishing village wasn’t much of a tourist destination, Banana River Naval Air Station was in disuse, and would close in September 1947 where it would be placed in a caretaker status.
That would change, however, on September 1, 1948, when the former naval air station was transferred to the newly formed US Air Force. In 1949, it was renamed the Joint Long Range Proving Ground, and was designated as the launch point for the military’s efforts to develop long range missile weapons.
It took until July 1950 for a rocket launch to happen at the new JLRPG. According to the NASA/US Army publication NIX 66P-0631, GPN-2000-000613:
“Bumper 8 was an ambitious two-stage rocket program that topped a V-2 missile base with a WAC Corporal rocket. The upper stage was able to reach then-record altitudes of almost 400 kilometers, higher than even modern Space Shuttles flown many years later. Launched under the direction of the General Electric Company, the Bumper Project was used primarily for testing rocket systems and for research on the upper atmosphere. Bumper rockets carried small payloads that allowed them to measure attributes including air temperature and cosmic ray impacts.”
date unknown.
Photo: US Army
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NASA / US Army Photo
Unlike many events of historic proportions, the launch was highly anticipated by some — “many people lined the beaches” waiting to see the missile launch, and on July 24, 1950, they weren’t disappointed:
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What they probably didn’t imagine at the time was that a few days short of nineteen years later that a million people would crowd into the area to watch men leave aboard a rocket on a trip to the moon. Back then, such things were the stuff of science fiction. Nor did they realize that their quiet town would be transformed into one of the major hubs of human spaceflight activity — something that is increasing, even now, at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. SpaceX, United Launch Alliance and others launch here now, and not too long from now, so will Blue Origin and Relativity Space.
Update:
The Cape Canaveral Space Force Museum released more photos and drawings from their Bumper 8 archive, and I am also including them here for posterity. All photos from US Army.
