The Mammoth Book of Space Exploration and Disasters

This is kind of humorous because the pilot gets into the airplane to run the engine. Everybody else gets into the block house. That is called “developing the confidence of the aviator.” In doing that run, we had a propulsion system failure that was born of something unique to the ground run that caused the airplane to blow up. About 1,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and 1,200 gallons of… and 800 pounds of 98% hydrogen peroxide got together and did their chemical thing. It was a pretty violent activity for a moment or two. It was like being inside the sun. It was such a fire outside that it was a very brilliant orange. The fore part of the airplane, which was all that was left, was blown about 30 feet forward – and I was in it. Of course I was pretty safe because I was in a structure that was designed to resist very high temperatures of re-entry flight.

Crossfield explained how he became a test pilot:

Well, I am an aeronautical engineer, an aerodynamicist, and a designer. My flying was only primarily because I felt that it was essential to designing and building better airplanes for pilots to fly. My professional endeavor really was more in that line than being a pilot per se. It was part of the whole circumstance of designing and building airplanes.

Chapter 2 Rockets Away – Escape from Earth

From the Second World War to the space race

On 8 September 1944 a German V-2 rocket hit Chiswick, West London. The V-2 was a ballistic missile known to its engineers as Aggregate-4. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced it as Vergeltungswaffe-2 or V-2, the second in a series of “vengeance weapons”, the first being a robot jet plane known as the V-1. The V-2 was fuelled by liquid alcohol and liquid oxygen (LOX), weighed 14 tons and carried 1 ton of high explosive.

The V-2 was designed by a group of German scientists led by Wernher von Braun. As a youth von Braun had been inspired both by science fiction and by the theories of Professor Herman Oberth. Like other German scientists he had been impressed by the 1926 Fritz Lang film The Woman in the Moon and by Oberth’s The Rocket into Planetary Space (1923). He joined a group of like-minded enthusiasts who formed an amateur rocketry club, the Verein fuer Raumschiffahrt: VfR (Space Travel Association).

Inspired by Oberth’s theoretical arguments, the Germans in the VfR conducted numerous static firings of rocket engines and launched a number of small rockets. Meanwhile, in 1931, the German Army inaugurated a modest rocket development program, hoping that rocketry could become an extension of long-range artillery. The program employed several of the VfR members.

The German Army’s ordnance ballistic section was interested in long-range bombardment weapons which were not forbidden to them by the Treaty of Versailles (1919). Under the terms of this Treaty, which had been concluded at the end of the First World War, Germany’s military power was strictly limited, but in 1919 rockets had not been considered to be serious weapons so they weren’t forbidden.