Space Cover #481: The Redstone MissileThe Goldey cover above was hand canceled on July 21, 1959 at Port Canaveral to document an unsuccessful flight (likely a training flight) of the Army Redstone Missile from Cape Canaveral.
The Redstone Missile was developed for the Army by Dr. Werner von Braun's team of rocket engineers and was a direct descendent of their WWII era V-2 rocket. The Redstone was designed to loft a warhead (either conventional or nuclear) 150 miles away. The first Redstone was launched on August 20, 1953 from Cape Canaveral. Three dozen more test flights followed over the next five years. Has anyone seen covers for any of these flights? If so, please post them!
The Redstone Missile became an operational weapon system on June 1, 1958 and Redstone units were deployed to Europe.
Meanwhile, von Braun had other uses for the Redstone. Several Redstones were modified with longer fuel tanks and the engines were modified to use a more powerful fuel. These were mated to clusters of small solid rocket motor upper stages and used to accelerate scale models of the Jupiter IRBM (also in development by the von Braun team) nosecone to the kinds of re-entry velocities that it would experience in flight. This Redstone-based launch vehicle was designated "Jupiter-Composite", or "Jupiter-C" to help disguise its heritage. And it just so happened that with the addition of a fourth stage, the Jupiter-C could reach earth orbit.
The first Jupiter C was launched on September 20, 1956 and the second on May 15, 1957. After America's double embarrassment of the successful Sputnik 1 launch and the very public unsuccessful launch attempt of the first Vanguard satellite, another Jupiter-C was fitted with that fourth stage and a small satellite. On January 31, 1958 that Redstone-based Jupiter-C put America's first satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit. Below is a Flick cachet cover machine-canceled that night at Patrick AFB.
More Jupiter-C's were used to put more Explorer satellites into orbit through 1959, and the Redstone was selected to loft the first Americans into space in Project Mercury. The Project Mercury flights have been very well chronicled in the literature and in Space Cover of the Week numbers 62, 110, 285, 296, 330, 467, and 480 , so we won't delve farther into them here.
The Redstone Missile was decommissioned as a weapon system on June 25, 1964. One surplus Redstone was launched from San Nicholas Island off of California on November 20, 1965 as a target for a Navy Terrier antiballistic missile. Ten surplus Redstones were fitted with upper stages and launched from Woomera, Australia as part of the joint US/UK/Australia SPARTA program to research antiballistic missile technology. The final SPARTA vehicle was fitted with Australia's first satellite, WRESAT, and launched it into orbit on November 29, 1967, thus ending the Redstone legacy.
I don't have a WRESAT cover. If any of you do, please post it as a fitting end to this story. And as always, if you need someone to host your cover image, please send it to me, glad to do that...
posted 09-02-2018 08:40 AM
advertisement