The Joint Long Range Proving Ground, 1949

The rocket range came to Cape Canaveral because of islands. On May 11, 1949, President Harry Truman signed the law establishing the Joint Long Range Proving Ground, a range for testing long-range guided missiles that the Army, Navy and Air Force would share under the Air Force’s supervision. The launch site was the cape. The reason, as the 1984 National Historic Landmark nomination for the station puts it, was that the missiles needed a sea range, “but the need for tracking stations provided the specific key for its location.”

The search

The search began in October 1946, when the Research and Development Board of the Joint Chiefs set up a committee to find a site, according to the Space Force’s heritage history of the range. A stray rocket sharpened it. On May 29, 1947, the landmark nomination says, a V-2 went out of control, traveled only 47 miles and came down near Juárez, Mexico, and within a month the committee had four candidates.

All of them were sea ranges, so the rockets would fly away from people, and the committee wanted chains of islands and other land along the flight path where tracking stations could be built. A launch site in Washington State, tracking along the Aleutians, came fourth: too cold, too remote. Expanding the Navy’s center at Point Mugu, California, out over the Pacific came third, for lack of land to put stations on. The first choice was the Naval Air Station at El Centro, California, with stations along the Gulf of California. The second was Cape Canaveral, 18 miles north of the Banana River Naval Air Station, with stations in the British-owned Bahamas.

El Centro fell through when Mexico’s President Alemán would not allow missile flights over Baja California; the nomination dates the failed negotiations to December 1947. Britain was willing to allow flights near the Bahamas and later agreed to lease land there for stations. On July 21, 1950, the British signed the Bahamian Agreement that allowed the range stations to be built.

What the cape had going for it

The heritage history lists the rest: the cape was far from crowded places but reachable by road, waterway and railroad, and apart from thunderstorms the weather was generally sunny and warm. The Banana River Naval Air Station, closed after the war, was close by and would make an excellent support base. And the cape’s lighthouse already stood on federal land, which made acquiring the site easier.

The Navy handed the Banana River station to the Air Force on September 1, 1948, in anticipation. It was renamed the Joint Long Range Proving Ground Base on June 10, 1949, and on October 1, 1949, the base was activated along with the proving ground’s advance headquarters. When the Defense Department moved the missile test centers from joint commands to single services in 1950, the range passed to the Air Force’s Long Range Proving Ground Division, and on August 1, 1950, the base became Patrick Air Force Base, after Maj. Gen. Mason M. Patrick.

The land

The cape had to be bought. Of the 12,000 acres the government acquired there in 1950, the heritage history says, it bought 2,328 outright, and the rest came through condemnation petitions in federal district court. In 1956 the Air Force announced it would add about 3,000 acres, and by the end of 1959 the reservation covered some 14,600 acres. The Space Force’s holdings on the cape came to roughly 15,804 acres in 2022.

The first missile, a V-2 with a WAC Corporal second stage known as Bumper 8, went up from the cape on July 24, 1950, from a pad the Army Corps of Engineers had built. During the next three years, the landmark nomination says, launch sites were built for cruise missiles including the Matador, first launched in 1951, and later the Snark and Bomarc; a 10,000-foot skid strip for recovering them followed in 1952.

Six names

The launch area changed names five times between 1949 and 1974, the nomination records, and once more since:

Year	Name
1949	Cape Canaveral
1950	Operating Subdivision No. 1
1951	Cape Canaveral Auxiliary Air Force Base
1955	Cape Canaveral Missile Test Annex
1964	Cape Kennedy Air Force Station
1974	Cape Canaveral Air Force Station
2020	Cape Canaveral Space Force Station

The range itself went from the Long Range Proving Ground (1949) to the Atlantic Missile Range (1958) and the Eastern Test Range (1964). Its stations downrange are the subject of our Eastern Test Range page, and the first launch of our Bumper 8 page.

Further Reading

• Live from Cape Canaveral by Jay Barbree