Bumper 8: July 24, 1950, the cape's first launch

The first rocket launched from Cape Canaveral was Bumper 8, on July 24, 1950. It was a two-stage rocket: a German V-2 missile as the first stage, with a scaled-down version of the Corporal sounding rocket, built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, on top. The V-2 lifted off normally from Launch Complex 3, but, NASA’s history of the flight says, it heeled over to 10 degrees instead of the planned 22, and the strain on the upper stage was such that it separated but never ignited.

Where Bumper came from

The rockets came out of the war. American forces captured German rocket engineers and V-2 missiles at the end of World War II, NASA’s account says, and under Operation Paperclip the engineers and their rockets went to Fort Bliss, Texas, next to the new White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. There Army engineers put the small WAC Corporal (the acronym may have stood for “Without Attitude Control”) on top of a V-2, making the first working two-stage liquid-fueled rocket. They called it Bumper.

The first Bumper flights were at White Sands in 1948. The first two carried no upper stage, and the next four, with the WAC, failed for various reasons. The fifth WAC flight, on February 24, 1949, worked: the upper stage reached 5,000 miles an hour and an altitude of 244 miles, more than double the V-2’s previous record of 110 miles.

Why Florida

White Sands was good for straight-up flights. Tests that needed to fly a long way downrange needed an overwater range, which did not exist in the 1940s. The new Long Range Proving Ground at Cape Canaveral, NASA’s history says, was chosen for its sparse population and for the abandoned Banana River Naval Air Station nearby, and it allowed launches to range 500 miles at first and eventually 5,000. The Army Corps of Engineers built Launch Complex 3, a pad and a blockhouse, for the Bumper tests. How the range came to the cape is on our proving-ground page.

Bumper 7 and Bumper 8

Bumper 7 was supposed to go first. It was set for July 19, 1950, but delays left its V-2 filled with liquid oxygen nine hours longer than planned, and moisture from the humid Florida air made a valve fail to open. The launch was scrubbed and Bumper 7 came off the pad for repairs. Bumper 8 took its place and flew on July 24.

Bumper 7 went up on July 29 and did somewhat better. Its V-2 also flew lower than planned, but the WAC separated at 8.5 miles up, fired for 40 seconds, passed 3,200 miles an hour (about half the target) and traveled 150 miles downrange. That was the end of the Bumper program. The Space Force’s table of first launches from the cape counts two Bumpers, both in July 1950.

What came after

Launch Complex 3 stayed in use for other rockets. In 1951 the Air Force renamed the range’s launch area Cape Canaveral Auxiliary Air Force Base, and two years later the first Redstone lifted off from the new Complex 4. With upper stages added, the Redstone became the Juno 1 that launched Explorer 1, the first American satellite, on January 31, 1958, and Redstones launched Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom on their suborbital Mercury flights in 1961.

The Space Force counts more than 3,600 major launches on the Eastern Range from Bumper 8 to 2022. The flights from the cape’s most famous pads are on our Mercury page and our Gemini page.

Further Reading

• Live from Cape Canaveral by Jay Barbree