the import of Goddard's ideas went unrecognized for the most part, and by the time they were widely known much of what he had done had been redone, as with the V-2. The opportunity to be the leader of the field during the course of his development work soon passed. Still, he was a man of genius and originality and the many honors later accorded him were well deserved. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, appropriately bears his name. Medals are awarded and symposia held in his honor. In 1958 the National Rocket Club began sponsoring the Robert H. Goddard Annual Memorial Dinner in Washington, faithfully attended by engineers, scientists, administrators, legislators, military men, industrialists-the Who's Who of rocket and space research-to pay tribute to Goddard's pioneering role. Space scientists also recognize in Goddard the first to work seriously on the problem of developing an effective means of sending scientific instruments beyond balloon altitudes into the upper atmosphere and outer space. But Goddard never did personally achieve his dream of using rockets for upper-atmosphere research. While he continued to work in obscurity, spending his final years during World War II working in secrecy for the U.S. Navy, the CalTech Rocket Research Project-reorganized in 1944 as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory-went on to become the first group in the United States to build and launch a rocket specifically designed for upperair research. Named the WAC-Corporal, the JPL rocket on 26 September 1945 rose to a height of about 70 kilometers, a U.S. record at the time. It is the JPL research, rather than Goddard's, from which a line can be traced directly to the space program. Writers associated with CalTech and the von Kármán group communicated the latest in rocketry to the public through scientific papers. 18 Although restricted in its circulation at the time, because of its bearing on military applications, a handbook of jet propulsion put out by JPL nevertheless reached large numbers of persons in rocket research and development. 19 More significantly for space science, the WACCorporal was the progenitor of a larger, improved sounding rocket, called Aerobee-in later versions capable of carrying a substantial instrument load above 200 kilometers-which became one of the mainstays of the American high-altitude research program.20 Neither Goddard's work nor the JPL rockets provided the initial impetus to the space science program in America. Circumstances made rocket sounding in the United States the beneficiary of the two decades of vigorous rocket development work by German experimenters that ensued following the publication of Oberth's Rocket into Planetary Space. Nourished by German military support, the German experimenters rediscovered and reinvented for themselves much of what Goddard was learning in the United States. Going well beyond what Goddard could accomplish in his self-imposed isolation, Walter Dornberger, Wernher von Braun, and their colleagues produced the V-2-Vergeltungswaffe-Zwei or "Vengeance Weapon Two"-the first large rocket to see substantial service.21 At the close of World War II, U.S. Army forces captured large numbers of these monsters at underground factories in the Harz Mountains in central Germany. Along with von Braun and key members of his team-who took the initiative to ensure that they became prisoners of American, not Russian, forces22—the Army took the captured V-2s to the United States. There the missiles were assembled, tested, and launched at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico to provide experience in the handling and operation of large rockets. Rather than fire the missiles empty, the Army offered to allow interested groups to instrument them for high-altitude scientific research. A number of military and university groups accepted, forming the V-2 Upper Atmosphere Research Panel, which became the aegis for the country's first sounding rocket program.23 4 The Rocket and Satellite Research Panel: As World War II came to a close, a group of engineers and scientists in the Communications Security Section of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington began to cast about for new research problems to which to apply their talents. Long hours were spent on the subject, and the list of possibilities grew to sizable proportions. Milton Rosen, a competent, versatile, imaginative electronics engineer, suggested that the group might apply its wartime experience with missiles and communications, including television, to a study of the upper atmosphere. The suggestion became the eighth to go on the blackboard in the office of Ernst Krause, head of the section. Thereafter it was referred to as Project 8. When the debate finally wound down, Project 8 was the clear winner. To the many physicists in the group the project offered an attractive and important field of research. The engineers could feel the challenge of instrumenting and launching the rockets that would be needed by the scientists. And because of the importance of knowledge of atmospheric properties to communications and the design and operation of missiles, it was possible that the Navy might support the project. The director of the laboratory approved the upper-air research proposal in December of 1945, and the section became the Rocket Sonde Research Section, a name that appropriately enough also came from the originator of the Project 8 idea. No one in the section was experienced in upper atmospheric research, so the section immediately entered a period of intensive self-education. Members lectured each other on aerodynamics, rocket propulsion, telemetering-whatever appeared to be important for the new tasks ahead. The author gave a number of talks on satellites and satellite orbits. Indeed, the possibility of going immediately to artificial satellites of the earth as research platforms was considered by the group, which assimilated carefully whatever information it could obtain from military studies of the time. The conclusion was that one could indeed begin an artificial satellite program and expect to succeed, but that the amount of new development required would be costly and time consuming. The scientists could not hope to have their instruments aloft for some years to come and, anyway, were not likely to get their hands on the necessary funds. The Rocket Sonde Research Section accordingly shelved the satellite idea and turned to sounding rockets. As they were considering what rockets—including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's WAC-Corporal-might be available for the research they contemplated, word came that the U.S. Army would be willing for interested scientists to conduct experiments in some of the V-2s it was planning to fire at the White Sands range in New Mexico. Because of the narrow confines of the range, the missiles would have to be fired along nearly vertical trajectories and would accordingly make ideal probes of the upper atmosphere. To explore the possibilities Krause invited a number of interested persons to meet at the Naval Research Laboratory. At the meeting, on 16 January 1946, physicists and astronomers interested in cosmic ray, solar, and atmospheric research were present. Because of the potential importance of upper-air data to military applications, the services were well represented. It was plain from the deliberations that a number of groups both in universities and in the military would be interested in taking part in a program of high-altitude rocket research. THE V-2 PANEL Accordingly, at an organizing meeting at Princeton University 27 February 1946, a panel was formed of members to be actually engaged in or in some way directly concerned with high-altitude rocket research.1 The original members (see also app. A) were: E. H. Krause (chairman), Naval Research Laboratory G. K. Megerian (secretary), General Electric Co. W. G. Dow, University of Michigan M. J. E. Golay, U.S. Army Signal Corps C. F. Green, General Electric Co. K. H. Kingdon, General Electric Co. M. H. Nichols, Princeton University J. A. Van Allen, Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University F. L. Whipple, Harvard University Because of his role in getting things started and because he would be devoting full time to upper-air research with rockets, Krause was elected chairman. To Krause must go the principal credit for getting the program under way. He was a physicist, with a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in spectroscopy, and a background in communications research. Both qualifications were pertinent to the development of techniques for the investigation of the sun and upper atmosphere. Krause's energy and drive were phenomenal, and his capacity for detail and thoroughness were ideally suited to welding all the elements needed to get a sounding rocket program off the ground. When Krause left in December 1947 to participate in nuclear bomb tests, James A. Van Allen was elected to the chair, a spot he occupied for the next decade.2 Van Allen is by far the best known of the original members of the V-2 panel. A physicist, at the time the panel was formed he was employed by the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University on the Bumblebee Project, a Navy missile research and development project. He brought to the panel an intense interest in cosmic ray physics, an interest that led in time to his discovery of the earth's radiation belts that now bear his name. The panel had no formal charter, no specified terms of reference from an authorizing parent organization, a circumstance that left the panel free in the years ahead to pursue its destiny in keeping with its own judgment. The immediate task was to provide Col. James G. Bain of the Army Ordnance Department with advice he had requested on the allocation of V-2s to the various research groups. This the panel proceeded at once to do, and in fact until the end of the V-2 program in 1952 continued to direct its reports to Army Ordnance as principal addressee. Thereafter the reports were issued simply to the members and to observers who attended the meetings, with copies to a selected list of interested persons and agencies (see app. B). The panel's program, if it may be called that, consisted of the collection of activities engaged in by its members. As a forum for discussion of past results and future plans, the panel was a breeding ground for ideas; but whatever control it might bring to bear on the program was exerted purely through the scientific process of open discussion and mutual criticism. For some time after its first session, the panel met monthly (see app. C). There was a great deal to do, quickly; for Army Ordnance and its contractor, General Electric Company, intended to fire the rockets on a rather rapid schedule. Since the German warheads were not suitable for carrying scientific payloads, the Naval Research Laboratory undertook to provide the different groups with standard nose sections specifically designed for housing the research instrumentation. To send information to the ground from the flying rocket, NRL also furnished telemetering equipment to go into the rocket and erected ground stations at the White Sands range for receiving and recording the data-bearing signals. In short order the word telemetering, meaning the making of remote measurements by radio techniques, became a familiar part of the growing jargon of rocket sounding. To make the most of the large capacity of the V-2, NRL designed and built a large, complex telemeter. The first version supplied to the program could provide 23 channels of information; a later version provided 30. With characteristic preference for smaller, simpler instrumenta |