The Redstone was the first large American ballistic missile and the trunk from which an entire family of launch vehicles grew. A direct descendant of the German V-2, it first flew in 1953, and its surplus airframes opened the way for the…
The R-7 Semyorka was the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile and, only months after its first successful flight, the vehicle that placed Sputnik 1 in orbit. Its layout of a central core ringed by four jettisonable boosters…
The Atlas family is the lineage of American missiles and launch vehicles that begins with the SM-65 intercontinental ballistic missile and reaches, seven decades later, the Atlas V. It was born as a Cold War weapon, had a short military…
Juno I was the four-stage launch vehicle that placed the first American satellite, Explorer 1, in orbit in 1958. Derived from the Jupiter-C sounding rocket and therefore from the Redstone missile, it flew for barely nine months and in that…
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