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

1. Scope
This report fi rst describes the history of rocket development before and during the Second World
War and their use as sounding rockets in Europe, the USA and the USSR, and then outlines the
technical, operational and scientifi c features of sounding rockets. The major European national
sounding-rocket activities and those of ESRO from the early 1960s to the early 1970s are then
described, a period when sounding rockets represented an important part of space research. Over
that time span, several hundred sounding rockets (up to 500 per year around 1970) were launched
worldwide each year.
This report does not present detailed scientifi c results obtained with the help of those soundingrocket
fl ights, or detailed technical descriptions of the payloads or the sounding rockets themselves.
Instead it gives a historical overview of the evolution of the use, benefi ts and importance
of sounding rockets, which provided access to space for scientifi c experiments for the fi rst time.
Sounding rockets also gave rise to the fi rst worldwide cooperation between scientists and spaceresearch
institutes.
During the 1960s to 1990s, sounding rockets provided inexpensive management schooling for
space scientists active in several space research disciplines around the World. Those managers
later became the key space scientists, when more sophisticated space research used complex
satellites to study the Universe. Sounding-rocket activities had a similarly benefi cial effect on the
creation of a space industry.
When ESRO decided to concentrate from 1972 onwards on scientifi c and applications satellites,
and on the development of the Ariane launcher and the Spacelab laboratory, and to discontinue its
own sounding-rocket programme, a second phase of European national sounding-rocket activities
– devoted to space science – proceeded. However, the fi rst European national-level sounding-rocket
programme, that of France, was terminated in the middle of the 1970s, whereas most
of the other ESRO/ESA Member States continued their national fl ight activities. Sounding-rocket
fl ights are still ongoing today, but since the 1990s the content and scale of global activity in the
space sciences has begun to shrink.
In the second half of the 1970s, a new sounding-rocket user discipline emerged, namely the use
of the free-fl ying phase of sounding-rocket fl ights for research in the materials and life sciences
under microgravity conditions. This new mode of applications was used for short-duration microgravity
experiments in fi elds such as fl uid physics, materials sciences and biology, as well as to
perform Spacelab and International Space Station (ISS) precursor experiments.
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