Sounding rocket
The term itself has its etymological roots in the Romance languages word for probe, of which there are nouns sonda and sonde and verbs like sondear which means "to do a survey or a poll".
The freefall part of the flight is an elliptic trajectory with vertical major axis allowing the payload to appear to hover near its apogee.
[2] The rocket consumes its fuel on the first stage of the rising part of the flight, then often separates and falls away, leaving the payload to complete the arc, sometimes descending under a drag source such as a small balloon or a parachute.
The German V-2 served both the US and the USSR's R-1 missile as sounding rockets during the immediate Post World War II periods.
[8] Amongst the speakers at the conference was Sergey Korolev[citation needed] who later became the leading figure of the Soviet space program.
Specifically interested in sounding rocket design were V. V. Razumov, of the Leningrad Group for the Study of Jet Propulsion.
A. I. Polyarny working in a special group within the Society for Assistance to the Defense, Aviation and Chemical Construction of the U.S.S.R in Moscow designed the R-06 which eventually flew but not in the meteorological role.
The immediate goal of the Suicide Squad was exploring the upper atmosphere which required developing the means of lofting instruments to high altitude and recovering the results.
During WWII the Signal Corps created a requirement for a sounding rocket to carry 25 pounds (11 kg) of instruments to 100,000 feet (30 km) or higher.
[9] To meet that goal Malina proposed a small Liquid-propellant rocket to provide the GALCIT team necessary experience to aid in developing the Corporal missile.
[10][11] Malina with Tsien Hsue-shen (Qian Xuesen in Pinyin transliteration), wrote "Flight analysis of a Sounding Rocket with Special Reference to Propulsion by Successive Impulses."
As the Signal Corps rocket was being developed for the Corporal project, and lacked any guidance mechanism, it was Without Attitude Control.
After the war the WAC Corporal was in competition for sounding mission funding with the much larger captured V-2 rocket being tested by the U.S. Army.
WAC Corporal was overshadowed at its job of cost-effectively lifting pounds of experiments to altitude, thus it effectively became obsolescent.
[23] It was first fired from a very primitive launch site, where the "command center" and borrowed power generator were in a grass hut separated from the launcher by a small river.
Vital to the development of Chinese rocketry and the Dong Feng-1 was Qian Xuesen (Tsien Hsue-shen in Wade Guiles transliteration) who with Theodore von Kármán and the California Institute of Technology "Suicide Squad" created the first successful sounding rocket the WAC Corporal.
[2] The smaller size of a sounding rocket also makes launching from temporary sites possible, allowing field studies at remote locations, and even in the middle of the ocean, if fired from a ship.
[29] During the Cold War, the Federal Republic of Germany cooperated on this topic with countries that had not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty on Nuclear Weapons at that time, such as Brazil, Argentina and India.
[30] The international discussion that was thus set in motion led to the development of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) at the level of G7 states.
