A photo from the San Diego Air and Space Museum’s collection of Images from NASA/Cape Canaveral.
Here are a couple of quotes from a recent Florida Today story describing the launch:
It was “the wild, wild West of rocketry” back on July 24, 1950, when technicians inside a wooden tar-paper shack launched Cape Canaveral’s first primitive rocket: Bumper 8, which had been assembled using a captured German V-2 missile.
The experimental 56½-foot rocket’s upper stage failed about 51,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean waters. But Bumper 8 successfully accelerated America’s Space Race and was “key to the DNA of the Cape,” said Jamie Draper, director of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Museum.
Seventy-five years and more than 8,000 missile and rocket launches later, Draper said Bumper 8 paved the way for the Cape to become America’s premier gateway to space.
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A small group of scientists, engineers and technicians launched Bumper 8 at 9:28 a.m. that date from the Long Range Proving Ground, which would later become Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
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Draper painted a portrait of how the Bumper 8 mission was “testing the waters on this newfangled thing called rocketry.” After crews finished building the 100-by-100-foot concrete launch pad roughly ½-mile northeast of the Cape Canaveral Lighthouse, a cableway led to the technicians’ unlikely “firing room” command center only 400 feet away: a wooden tar-paper shack.
“Not a reinforced concrete bunker that they used for the next however-many decades. But that tar-paper shack, with that sandbag-and-sand berm surrounding it in a horseshoe pattern, offering some level of protection. That’s the berm that all the photographers were on,” Draper said.
A telephone pole sunk into the pad’s cement helped stabilize the rocket’s umbilical tower, Draper said. And two “mobile service towers” standing six or seven stories tall were merely painters’ scaffolding on wheels.
“You look at these photos, and it’s just all these shirtless servicemembers or contractors muscling the scaffolding in place, muscling this trailer around with the rocket on it to put it in position. Super rustic, compared to what followed just a couple years later,” he said.