User:Neopeius/Articles/1956 in spaceflight

In 1955, both the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR) announced plans for launching the world's first satellites during the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–58. Project Vanguard, proposed by the US Navy, won out over the US Army's Project Orbiter as the satellite and rocket design to be flown in the IGY. Development of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, the Atlas by the US and the R-7 by the USSR, accelerated, entering the design and construction phase.

Both the US and USSR continued to launch a myriad of sounding rockets to probe the outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere and to take quick glimpses of the sun beyond the obscuring layers of air. The Aerobee Hi, first launched in April, promised a comparatively low cost alternative to other high altitude sounding rockets. The State University of Iowa meanwhile experimented with balloon-launched rockoons on its fourth expedition into the Atlantic Ocean.

Sounding Rockets
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the 100 km boundary of space (as defined by the World Air Sports Federation)

The year saw the completion of the second series of Soviet suborbital flights with dogs as payloads. After the nine-launch series was complete, conducted with variations on the R-1 rocket, the results were published as "Vital Activity of Animals during Rocket Flights into the Upper Atmosphere" in December 1956 at an international conference in Paris. These flights made it clear that advanced animals could survive the rigors of space launch, reentry, and weightlessness. They also tested spacesuits, parachute recovery of space travelers, and radio telemetry.

Project Vanguard
Work continued apace on Project Vanguard, the civilian satellite project initiated in fall 1955. Vanguard consisted of a tiny satellite and a rocket launcher, the latter comprising a Viking (rocket) first stage mated with two smaller rocket stages. Starting in 1956, John T. Mengel and his Naval Research Laboratory Tracking and Guiding Branch began designing the Minitrack system, a worldwide network of stations that would receive data on 108 MHz broadcast by Vanguard's tiny transmitter. In April 1946, work began on a global optical tracking network as well, whose task would be to locate the satellite in the sky so that Minitrack could maintain continuous tracking. In addition to twelve observation stations around the world, amateurs were also recruited to assist. While it would have been logistically useful to have Minitrack and optical stations at the same site, the two types of stations had different requirements--the radio stations requiring flat ground away from interference, and the visual stations needing clear skies. In the end, only Woomera in Australia had a combined tracking station.

The year saw the first Vanguard test flight: the launch of an unmodified Viking rocket (#13). The purpose of Vanguard TV-0, launched in the early morning of 8 December 1956, was to familiarize the Vanguard team with launch operations, and to test the range safety and tracking systems at Cape Canaveral's Air Force Missile Test Center (AFMTC). TV-0 reached an altitude of 126.5 mi and a range of 97.6 mi. 120 seconds into the flight, the rocket ejected a small sphere equipped with a Minitrack transmitter. Its broadcasts were picked up without difficulty by AFMTC's tracking stations before the little device hit the Atlantic Ocean. A post-flight evaluation conducted mid-December determined that the rocket's performance had been "either satisfactory or superior", that rocketborne instrumentation and telemetry had been "excellent", and ground coverage of the instrumentation had been "adequate". The stage was set for Vanguard's first multi-stage launch, scheduled for the following year.

Project Orbiter
In 1956, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) continued attempts to enlist Hagen in support of Project Orbiter, an Army plan to use a slightly modified Redstone (a 200 miles) range surface-to-surface missile developed the prior year) combined with upper stages employing 31 Loki solid-propellant rockets could put a 5 lb satellite into orbit, which could be tracked optically. Though Orbiter had been officially rejected the year before in favor of Vanguard, ABMA hoped Redstone-Orbiter could still be used as a backup orbital system. Reentry tests that year conducted with the newly developed, Redstone-based Jupiter-C, further strengthened ABMA confidence in their vehicle as an orbital launcher. Though Orbiter remained unapproved, late in the year the Army did authorize production and firing of 12 Jupiter-Cs for nosecone reentry tests. This set the stage for the Jupiter-C to be the de facto backup in the event of Vanguard's failure.

Long-range missiles
Development of an ICBM was given paramount importance by the United States government in 1955 on the heels of a secret report made in February 1955 by James Rhyne Killian to the National Security Council on Soviet rocket progress. Not only was the 5500 km-range Atlas, America's first ICBM, made the highest-priority project in the nation, but Titan, a more capable ICBM, was authorized for development as well. By late 1956, the Convair-produced Atlas was being configured for launch operations. On 10 October 1956, a non-flying Atlas arrived at Cape Canaveral in Florida, where it was checked for compatibility with the Cape's existing launch facilities. Test flights of the first "Series A" run of missiles would begin in 1957.

The Thor Intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), with a range of 2500 km, was also authorized in 1955, to be developed and deployed in Europe in just three years. The Douglas-produced Thor, the first missile to use inertial guidance, had its basic configuration and size frozen in January 1956. Engine testing began in March 1956 with the first engine delivered by Rocketdyne in August, by which time the inertial guidance system was finished as well. The same month, warhead data was provided to General Electric, which had been contracted to produce the missile's nose cone. The size of the nose cone was fixed in September. Test launches of the completed missile would take place in 1957.

The US Army’s Wernher von Braun-led Guided Missile Development Division team that had recently developed the short-ranged PGM-11 Redstone, proposed an alternate IRBM in 1955. The PGM-19 Jupiter would have the same range as the Thor, and be developed over the next six years. United States Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson authorized this missile in September 1955, to be jointly developed by the Army and the US Navy. It was dubbed Jupiter in April 1956.

All of these missiles were ultimately adapted into orbital delivery rockets.

Object D, the first Soviet satellite project
On 30 January 1956, the Soviet government approved Resolution #149-88, authorizing "Object D". This was a satellite massing 1000 kg to 1400 kg, about a fourth of which would be devoted to scientific instruments. This proposal, created in 1955 by engineer Mikhail Tikhonravov, had been endorsed by Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev upon learning that Object D would outmass the announced American satellite by nearly 1,000 times. Work on the project began in February 1956 with a planned launch date of latter 1957. The design was finalized on 24 July.

By the 1956, it had become clear that the complicated Object D would not be finished in time for a 1957 launch. Thus, in December 1956, OKB-1 head Sergei Korolev proposed the development of two simpler satellites: PS, Prosteishy Sputnik, or Preliminary Satellite. The two PS satellites would be simple spheres massing 83.4 kg and equipped solely with a radio antenna. The project was approved by the government on 25 January 1957.

R-7 Semyorka ICBM
Full scale tests of the RD-108 rocket engines that would power the R-7 Semyorka, the Soviet Union's first ICBM, began in January 1956. That same month, work began in earnest on "Site 1", the launch pad at Ministry of Defense Scientific-Research and Test Firing Range No.5 (NIIP-5), located in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (now Kazakhstan) near the Syr-Darya river. Completed by the end of May, the platform measured 250 m by 100 m by 45 m. An exact duplicate was set up for testing and validation purposes in Leningrad, and a full-scale test version of the R-7 was subjected to wind tests thereon. On 5 October, workers finished the road connecting Site 1 and the living settlement at Site 10, nicknamed Zarya.

Other Soviet missiles
In May and June 1956, three R-5R missiles—R-5M Medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBM) with their nuclear payloads replaced with radio control instrument packages—were the first Soviet missiles to be launched with radio guidance. The ground stations developed to control these missiles served as prototypes for those being built to support R-7 operations. A series of ten launches of another R5 variant, the M-5RD, tested other R-7 components including guidance, stabilization, and propellant feed. All of these launches were successful.

This is a list of spaceflight related events which occurred in 1956.


 * Manned orbital spaceflight studied
 * First nuclear warhead launched on a missile
 * Atlas, Titan, Redstone programs going strong
 * China begins missile development
 * The race to launch a satellite heats up
 * Japan's first substantial sounding rocket launched, the Kappa-1, but nation wouldn't go to space until the Kappa-8 in 1960
 * First spaceflight launches from Canadian facility at Churchill