'Wild West of rocketry': Cape Canaveral's first launch, Bumper 8, marks 75th anniversary

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6 days ago

It was "the wild, wild West of rocketry" back on July 24, 1950, when technicians inside a wooden tar-paper shack launched Cape Canaveral's first primitive rocket: Bumper 8, which had been assembled using a captured German V-2 missile.
The experimental 56½-foot rocket's upper stage failed about 51,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean waters. But Bumper 8 successfully accelerated America's Space Race and was "key to the DNA of the Cape," said Jamie Draper, director of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Museum.
Seventy-five years and more than 8,000 missile and rocket launches later, Draper said Bumper 8 paved the way for the Cape to become America's premier gateway to space.
"Bumper 8, when that launched, that was the early days of the Cold War. And you had the mad dash of missile development, paralleled with Space Race developments," Draper said.
"What were they doing? They were testing all kinds of high-speed or high-velocity staging of rockets. That became essential for all of our future space programs, all the way up to today," he said.
"And it all started with Bumper," he said.
Bumper 8 rocket: Since 1st rocket launch 75 years ago, Brevard undergoes huge development sparked by Space Race
A small group of scientists, engineers and technicians launched Bumper 8 at 9:28 a.m. that date from the Long Range Proving Ground, which would later become Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. This week, officials on Florida's Space Coast will host a pair of 75th anniversary events:
■ Thursday evening, the U.S. Space Force Historical Foundation will host an invitation-only celebration during a VIP dinner event at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.
The speaker lineup features Space Force Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy Jr. and former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, and the event will kick off the foundation's new Legacy of Launch fundraising drive.
■ For the general public, the newly remodeled and revamped Sands Space History Center — which celebrated a grand reopening in mid-June — will host a Bumper Bash from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday, July 26.
Admission is free, and the museum address is 100 Spaceport Way on the north side of Port Canaveral. Activities will include scavenger hunts, giveaways, refreshments, special displays and a coloring station.
Florida Historical Society Executive Director Ben Brotemarkle called Bumper 8 not only a landmark event in Space Coast history, but in national and world history.
"I always have to smile looking at the photographs. It almost looks like an old science fiction movie — and the people seem to be right on top of the launch. You wonder about the safety protocols there. They seem to be right by where this rocket is going off," Brotemarkle said.
'The wild, wild West of rocketry'
A control panel inside the Bumper blockhouse, shown in this July 1950 U.S. Air Force photo.
Draper painted a portrait of how the Bumper 8 mission was "testing the waters on this newfangled thing called rocketry." After crews finished building the 100-by-100-foot concrete launch pad roughly ½-mile northeast of the Cape Canaveral Lighthouse, a cableway led to the technicians' unlikely "firing room" command center only 400 feet away: a wooden tar-paper shack.
"Not a reinforced concrete bunker that they used for the next however-many decades. But that tar-paper shack, with that sandbag-and-sand berm surrounding it in a horseshoe pattern, offering some level of protection. That's the berm that all the photographers were on," Draper said.
A telephone pole sunk into the pad's cement helped stabilize the rocket's umbilical tower, Draper said. And two "mobile service towers" standing six or seven stories tall were merely painters' scaffolding on wheels.
"You look at these photos, and it's just all these shirtless servicemembers or contractors muscling the scaffolding in place, muscling this trailer around with the rocket on it to put it in position. Super rustic, compared to what followed just a couple years later," he said.
During 2023-24, University of Central Florida Department of Anthropology students and faculty teamed up with Space Launch Delta 45 to excavate and study the long-abandoned Bumper 8 blockhouse site. The University of South Florida's Center for Digital Heritage and Geospatial Information also used a light scanner to create a 3D-map of the site.
Now, the Sands Space History Center is displaying a Bumper 8 "First Cape Launch" feature exhibit through mid-August. Excavated blockhouse artifacts include pieces of tarpaper, roofing nails, fragments of mirror from a viewing periscope, grommets and pieces of a Coke bottle produced by a bottling plant in Cocoa.
Rocketry fuels Space Coast's fast-paced growth
In terms of economic and cultural impact, Brotemarkle said Bumper 8 — Cape Canaveral's inaugural launch — served as a catalyst for Brevard County's eye-popping population growth. Consider Cocoa Beach's statistics:
A mere 246 people lived in sleepy Cocoa Beach in 1950, census records show.
That population skyrocketed 14-fold during the 1950s as the Cold War heated up, reaching 3,475 residents by 1960.
Then Cocoa Beach's population nearly tripled during the 1960s thanks to NASA's Project Mercury, Gemini and Apollo moon-race programs, hitting 9,952 residents by 1970.
Two weeks ago, the Brevard County Commission adopted a resolution proclaiming Thursday as Space Coast Day in honor of Bumper 8's 75th anniversary. Draper said 16 Brevard communities and municipalities did likewise.
The Space Coast Day proclamation noted that Bumper 8 and subsequent groundbreaking missions led to America's first satellite, Explorer I, orbiting Earth in 1958; Alan Shepard riding the first crewed Mercury capsule in 1961; John Glenn orbiting Earth in 1962; Apollo 11 landing on the moon in 1969; NASA's space shuttle program; and a permanent human presence in space aboard the International Space Station.
"Bumper is just key to the DNA of the Cape. Not just for beginning this sequence of launches that's gone into 75 years, but for that spirit of exploration," Draper said.
"It was just an epic, epic beginning to this premier gateway to space."
For the latest news from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center, visit floridatoday.com/space. Another easy way: Click here to sign up for our weekly Space newsletter.
Rick Neale is a Space Reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Neale at [e-mail]. Twitter/X: @RickNeale1
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This article originally appeared on Florida Today: 'Like an old science fiction movie': Cape's first rocket launch marks 75 years