James Lockridge is an independent historian pursuing a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Arizona. He is also a researcher at the Space Imagery Center, Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona; a NASA Solar System Ambassador; and an evening guide at Kitt Peak National Observatory. This piece is connected to work he is doing with the support of an AIP grant-in-aid, digitizing photos and other archival assets related to Kitt Peak’s Rocket Program, which are held by NSF NOIRLab.

Visit NOIRLab’s online image gallery for additional photos. The original version of this article, including links to relevant digitized archival materials, can be found on the NOIRLab Stories Blog. The author offers special thanks to Sharon Hunt and Pete Marenfeld, who made this research possible.

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In 1959, the United States was just beginning to build ground-based telescopes on Kitt Peak (l’oligam Du’ag) in Arizona, on newly leased land from the Tohono O’odham Nation. While NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) was working to establish democratic access in the US to ground-based astronomy, its ambitious first director, Aden Meinel, also sought to send scientific instruments into space.

Aden Meinel was a first-class optical instrument builder who spearheaded the quest to find a scientifically validated site for the country’s new national observatory, leading to the establishment of KPNO. He became immersed in rocketry during World War II, a time when rocket science was emerging as a national priority. He designed fuses, multi-stage solid-propellant rockets, and launchers for Caltech as an undergraduate. As a US Navy ensign, he was sent to Europe to investigate German V-2 rocket hardware and optical instruments. Afterward, Meinel worked at Yerkes Observatory, where he proposed construction of a 500-inch telescope mirror—more than twice the size of the world’s largest at the time. That project quietly faded when he left the observatory, but it defined his character: restless, competitive, and innovative. KPNO’s director was determined to lean into the Space Race.

In 1959, two years into his work as director of KPNO, Meinel attempted to bring US-funded astronomy to space by proposing a 50-inch space-based satellite telescope. To explore the feasibility of such a project, an oversight committee was formed, and Meinel consulted with experts in the field. Notably, Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, attended committee meetings. Meinel also met with the US Army, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and the Army Ballistic Missile Agency to present KPNO’s interest in space-based astronomy and begin exploring designs for a telescope to be sent to space aboard a large Saturn rocket. But history had another path to space for Kitt Peak.

The Rocket Program’s origins

In 1961, Meinel left KPNO to work for the University of Arizona. The new Space Division director arrived that year: physicist Joseph Chamberlain, who studied aeronomy, the science of the upper atmospheres of Earth and other planets.

Chamberlain would reject the concept for a satellite telescope in favor of a rocket program, which had a major advantage over satellites: speed. A satellite mission required a minimum of four years of lead time, and the instruments had to survive indefinitely in orbit—they couldn’t be recovered for refurbishment. But a rocket experiment could go from concept to launch in about a year, and when a new idea emerged or a new technology became available, rockets could test it quickly.

Chamberlain would change the course of KPNO’s Space Division. He would forgo the large, ambitious, and resource-devouring 50-inch space telescope project and replace it with the Kitt Peak Rocket Program—a more reliable program consisting of frequent hops into space with smaller, more diverse instruments. These instruments would be on board sounding rockets launched into the atmosphere to conduct research. Above the clouds, these instruments could measure wavelengths of light that don’t reach the surface of the Earth, blocked by its atmosphere.

The workhorse of the Kitt Peak Rocket Program was the Aerobee sounding rocket. Its first stage was a solid-fuel booster that fired for less than four seconds, but delivered a ferocious thrust, pushing the rocket off its launch boom at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. Once the solid booster was spent, it fell away, and a liquid-fueled second stage took over with a controlled burn that would bring the instruments to a precise altitude. About 80 seconds after liftoff, its instruments were exposed to space where they made their observations automatically. By then, the rocket was above the Kármán line—the 100-kilometer altitude where the atmosphere is so thin that aerodynamic flight becomes impossible and only rockets can function. By international convention, the rocket and instruments were in space.

Kitt Peak’s rockets would be equipped with an array of instruments for studying astronomy: spectrometers to identify gases in planetary upper atmospheres; x-ray cameras to take pictures of the Sun; polarimeters to characterize Earth’s interplanetary dust that creates zodiacal light; telescopes that were cooled to the temperature of liquid helium to observe the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

The usable science window lasted about five to six and a half minutes. Then, as gravity pulled the rocket back toward Earth along its brief arc, the instrument payload was physically severed from the rocket body. When it dropped to a lower altitude, a parachute deployed, lowering the instruments back to the desert floor of the missile range. The team would then drive out and pick them up. The instruments were refurbished, calibrated, and often flown again.

Getting above the atmosphere, even briefly, transformed what was possible for aeronomy. The very first set of Kitt Peak flights studied airglow—a faint light produced by chemical reactions between the Sun and particles in Earth’s atmosphere. The Kitt Peak flights resulted in the first daytime airglow spectral scans and the first airglow photometry experiment. A series of flights in 1967 and 1968 measured the ultraviolet spectra of Venus and Jupiter.

A lasting record of a brief era

The Space Division would become the Planetary Sciences Division in 1969, but the rocket program continued to point instruments at targets other than planets. Notably, earlier in the decade, the first x-ray source from outside of our Solar System was discovered: Scorpius X-1. This exciting new find opened the frontier of x-ray astronomy. Soon after, Kitt Peak launched rockets equipped with spectrometers to investigate the unique properties of Scorpius X-1. They found an optically thick plasma surrounding the object: an accretion disk formed by a neutron star tearing material away from its smaller companion star.

In 1970, after 21 launches, the Kitt Peak team had achieved a 71% mission success rate—a record that earned admiration from peer institutions and visiting scientists. But reliability was never perfect. For example, a flight in January 1966 had to shut down its sustainer engine 48 seconds after launch when a pressure monitor line ruptured. Without the engine, the rocket tumbled. The problem turned out to be a poorly tightened nut on a pneumatic line. Then, a December 1966 flight suffered a high-frequency vibration that ejected the rocket’s inner liner, causing the rocket to disintegrate 200 feet above the ground.

Every flight had a logbook that gathered reports, test results, telemetry data, correspondence, and invoices. The records that survived are an archive of how space science was actually done.

As the program matured through the late 1960s, its position within the institution became increasingly complicated. NASA had taken formal ownership of American “space exploration” as a concept. The US National Science Foundation would not fund space programs, which were NASA’s domain. By 1970, priorities at the observatory were shifting toward completing a massive new 4-meter telescope, which would later be the NSF Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope, and administrative support for the rocket program began to erode. The last rocket flew in 1973.

The final manager of the Rocket Program was Lloyd Vincent Wallace. He had been the principal investigator when the program launched its first rocket, and eventually served as Acting Associate Director of the Space Division. Wallace preserved its physical archive—the photographs, logbooks, test reports, invoices, and correspondence that document nearly a decade of rocket astronomy in granular detail. That collection is now held at NSF NOIRLab Headquarters Library in Tucson, Arizona, where it bears his name: the Lloyd Vincent Wallace Rocket Program Papers.

The program’s legacy

The details of the Kitt Peak Rocket Program have long been forgotten, but its legacy is very real.

The pointing technology developed at Kitt Peak to stabilize rockets for astronomical observation went from an accuracy of two degrees to an arc minute over the life of the program—a 120-fold improvement. That engineering was adopted by the Naval Research Laboratory for its own solar x-ray research.

The scientists who flew experiments through the program went on to have distinguished careers. For instance, Lyle Broadfoot, who led missions to study the atmospheres of Mars and Jupiter with Kitt Peak rockets, became the principal investigator for the ultraviolet spectrometer for NASA’s Voyager program—the instruments that would go on to study Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in flybys across the outer Solar System.

The program also produced something more abstract: a proof of concept for how individual scientists and small teams could access space. There were dozens of rocket flights and investigators. They reached high and far for data that was returned to Earth on parachutes and carried back to the laboratory, making real contributions to science.

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James Lockridge
jamesedgarlockridge@gmail.com

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