Good morning, Whitewater
There’s one municipal meeting scheduled for the City of Whitewater today, at 2 p.m. — the Broadband Communication Consortium meets at 2 p.m.
Wired reports that in science history on this date, in 1950, ” America Gets a Spaceport.”
Cape Canaveral, a name that would become synonymous with the U.S. space program by the late ’50s, was just an obscure spit of land jutting into the Atlantic Ocean along Florida’s eastern shore when, in 1948, an Air Force committee recommended its procurement for a missile testing range….
Actually, the Cape was only the committee’s second choice. But the original site in California was rejected after the Mexican government refused to let rockets traverse the air space over Baja California. (A near miss in Juarez, Mexico, where a wayward rocket from White Sands, New Mexico, crashed into a cemetery, probably influenced that decision.)
The British colonial governors of the Bahamas were not as squeamish, so Cape Canaveral got the nod. President Harry Truman inked the legislation in 1949 establishing the Joint Long Range Proving Ground at Cape Canaveral.
Aside from the clear air space, the Cape suited the needs of the military in other ways, too. Its remote location (Florida was a lot different then than it is now) and the fact that the downrange trajectory of a rocket launched eastward would be over the ocean were desirable. Also, the Cape is closer than California is to the Equator. That made it easier to launch rockets to the east, following the Earth’s rotation. Sites with similar attributes, such as Hawaii and Puerto Rico, were rejected for logistical reasons.
The first rocket to lift off from Cape Canaveral was a Bumper V-2, modified from the World War II-era German V-2s that pounded London. The two-stage rocket — using a V-2 booster topped by a WAC-Corporal second stage — was used mainly to conduct atmospheric tests….
Photo: Bumper V-2 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral on July 24, 1950.
Courtesy NASA.
Here’s today’s almanac —
| Almanac | ||
|---|---|---|
| Friday, July 24, 2009 | Sunrise | Sunset |
| Official Time | 05:37 AM | 08:24 PM |
| Civil Twilight | 05:04 AM | 08:57 PM |
| Tomorrow | 05:38 AM | 08:23 PM |
| Tomorrow will be: | 2 minutes shorter | |
| Amount of sunlight: | 14h 47m | |
| Amount of daylight: | 15h 53m | |
| Moon phase: | Waxing crescent | |