The History of Sounding Rockets and Their Contribution to ... - ESA

7. Research in Space and Industrial Space Activities Prompted by
Sounding-Rocket Flights
In the 1950s, sounding rockets enabled European scientists for the fi rst time to perform experiments in
the upper atmosphere and the ionosphere, as well as solar and astrophysics studies with payloads carried
by sounding rockets above the Earth’s atmosphere. When, a few years later, the fi rst small satellites were
built and launched, the space-science community quickly recognised the advantages and disadvantages of
experimentation using sounding rockets, notably:
- short development and turn-around times of such projects, which was very important in order to complete
university theses within reasonable time spans
- less demanding requirements regarding fl ight-hardware reliability and safety compared with experiment
hardware on satellites and manned missions
- lower costs for experiment fl ight-hardware development
- sounding rockets were recognised as being a unique tool for performing in-situ experiments at
altitudes between the maximum achievable with balloons (40 km) and the perigee of stable satellite
orbits (200 km)
- the short observation time (minutes) was the major disadvantage, compared with satellites (years), for the
study of long-duration phenomena
- the great fl exibility of sounding rockets as regards launch time made them an ideal means of studying
transient phenomena such as aurora appearances.
The performance of scientifi c experiments on both sounding rockets and satellites led to an unprecedented
expansion of international cooperation, because such cooperation enabled the use of more complete sets
of measuring instruments to achieve particular scientifi c objectives and better use of the special skills of
specifi c research teams.
The sounding-rocket programme had the advantage of quick successes, compared with satellite projects. A
further very important aspect favoured scientifi c cooperation. In Europe, the main launch sites were located
in northern Scandinavia. There, young European research teams performed joint fi eld experiments and spent
many long nights together in that polar setting. This created a meaningful bond between scientists of different
nationalities.
As can be seen from ESRO’s sounding-rocket programme, enormous technical progress was made over a
short period within a matter of years. It started with the launch of very simple gas-cloud experiments using
metal compounds released by sounding rockets and observed from the ground. This ESRO activity was
concluded some eight years later with very complex Sun- and star-pointing payloads incorporating threeaxis-stabilised
attitude-control systems, telemetry and telecommand capabilities, and payload-recovery
systems. The launch success rate improved from 38% in 1965 to 93% in 1972, a time span that included 44
consecutive completely successful sounding-rocket launches during one three-year period (1969-1972).
Although the ESRO sounding-rocket programme was wound up for sound policy reasons, those activities
undeniably made an extremely valuable and signifi cant contribution to space-science development,
cooperation and history at ESRO/ESA, to the national space programmes of the various European countries
participating, and to initiating space-related work in European industry.
Whereas the USA and the USSR by the early 1950s had already used military rocket technology for peaceful
scientifi c measurements to obtain information about the Earth’s upper atmosphere constituents and dynamics
and solar radiation, Europe joined the fi eld quickly around the late 1950s/early 1960s with national
sounding-rocket programmes in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, and also at European
level coordinated by ESRO.
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