 In a previous video I talked about how America's first astronauts were arguably corn seeds and fruit floods, and I mentioned that they were launched on sounding rockets, so you guessed it, today on Vintage Space we're going to do a quick look at sounding rockets. Sounding rockets are small rockets designed to carry a small payload of scientific instruments up to an altitude where it can actually gain data on the high atmosphere environment. The key with sounding rockets is, because most flights go above most of the appreciable atmosphere, any data gathered about cosmic radiation or space phenomenon is done without the atmosphere interfering with results. It's really handy for scientists. Scientists knew that rockets would be an excellent way to study the upper atmosphere, and it's actually one of the reasons Robert Goddard started pursuing liquid propulsion in the 1910s. One of the earliest sounding rockets, and perhaps one of the most famous sounding rockets, is the V2. The rocket the German army launched on London in the final days of the Second World War that was then brought over to the United States with a handful of scientists. Some parts were refurbished, others were duplicated by American scientists to create an entire program based on using the V2 for high atmospheric research as well as rocket research. But the first sounding rocket launched the United States was actually an American design. The WAC Corp. was built and designed by Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The 21 foot long rocket was first launched on October 11th of 1945, and it reached a peak altitude of almost 44 miles. And some sources say that WAC stands for Without Attitude Control because the rocket had no control or guidance system on board. And rather famously, sounding rockets played a very important part in the international geophysical year of 1957 to 1958. This intensive 18-month investigation into solar phenomena by 66 nations saw more than 300 instrumented sounding rockets launch from sites around the world, making significant discoveries of the atmosphere, the ionosphere, cosmic radiation, auroras, and geomagnetism. But of course, sounding rockets are limited in their application. A sounding rocket's flight is ballistic, which means it goes straight up and then straight back down again. That means the payload on board has only the brief top of the arc of the ballistic flight to take those measurements. The next step after sounding rockets was to use either a larger rocket or a cluster of smaller rockets to launch a payload into orbit. In orbit, a satellite is completely free of atmospheric disturbance and can stay aloft much longer than the brief arc of a ballistic flight. And sounding rockets actually played an interesting role in getting America's first satellite, Explorer-1, into orbit in February of 1958. The Jupiter-C rocket that launched Explorer-1 into orbit had a redstone first stage and three upper stages using clusters of Sargent rockets. The Sargent was a solid-fueled, second-generation version of the Watt Corporal, also built by JPL. Research from sounding rockets ultimately gave rise to X-ray ultraviolet and gamma-ray astronomy, and sounding rockets are still used today. NASA has a sounding rocket research program, and amateur and commercial groups alike launch sounding rockets all the time. Although we don't necessarily hear about a lot of these experiments, but some we do, like Nincasi Brewing, who recently launched their live yeast for ground control beer on a UP Aerospace sounding rocket. And where does the name sounding rockets come from? It's derived from the analogy to maritime sounding methods used to measure the depths of the ocean. Have any of you guys ever participated in a sounding rocket launch? Let me know in the comments below and of course if you have any questions or ideas for follow-up episodes or other topics you'd like to see covered, leave me a message in the comments as well. For vintage space content, every single day of the week, be sure to follow me on Twitter as AST Vintage Space. And with new episodes going up right here every single Tuesday and Friday, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode.