WAC Corporal
American sounding rocket
The WAC Corporal was the first operational sounding rocket developed in the United States. It was an offshoot of the Corporal program, that was started by a partnership between the United States Army Ordnance Corps and the California Institute of Technology (named "ORDCIT") in June 1944 with the ultimate goal of developing a military ballistic missile.
Development History
The California Institute of Technology had been fostering a group of rocket engineers in the 1930s at their Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT) including Frank Malina, Jack Parsons, and Edward Forman. They became known as the "suicide squad" because so many of their early experiments at the Laboratory blew up. Some of the GALCIT enthusiasts had founded a business to manufacture rocket motors called Aerojet.
During the first years of World War II, GALCIT had pursued the development of both solid and liquid-fueled Jet Assisted Take Off (JATO) boosters to aid aircraft take off performance. As the group had experimented with rockets for several years before the war they were selected by the Army to pursue ballistic rocket development.
The first rocket designed by the group for the Army was designated as XFS10S100-A, also known as the Private, that being the first Army enlisted rank. The second ORDCIT project, which became the Corporal, named for the next Army enlisted rank, was a project originally named XF30L 20,000. The Corporal project envisioned a liquid propellant missile of 30-inch (760 mm) diameter and a power of 20,000 pounds-force (89 kN).
The public source identifies “WAC Corporal” as american sounding rocket. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Corporal, American and sounding.
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This entry incorporates text from “WAC Corporal” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.