Redstone version
Redstone PGM-11 Redstone
The PGM-11 Redstone was the operational weapon at the root of the family: a single-stage, liquid-fuelled short-range missile built by Chrysler for the US Army. It first flew from Cape Canaveral in August 1953, went on alert in West Germany in June 1958 and was withdrawn in 1964. Every later Redstone vehicle was a modification of this airframe.
- August 20, 1953
- First launch
- 347 kN
- Thrust
- No
- Reusable
History
Paperclip engineering
The missile was laid out at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama, by the German team Operation Paperclip had brought to the United States under Wernher von Braun, and the ancestry is visible throughout: the same alcohol-and-liquid-oxygen propellant pair as the V-2, the same jet vanes in the exhaust for steering. The Army named the weapon after the arsenal that built it on 8 April 1952, and the arsenal itself had been named for the red rock and soil of northern Alabama.
A rough start
The first round left pad LC-4A at Cape Canaveral on 20 August 1953 and flew for about a minute and a half before an engine failure dropped it in the sea. The second, on 27 January 1954, covered its 55 miles cleanly. The third, that May, lost thrust a second after release and fell back onto the pad — the failure that produced von Braun's famous non-answer to General Toftoy. What followed was a sustained push on workmanship and reliability; the Army called the missile operational in mid-1955 and moved testing to the larger LC-5 and LC-6 pads.
On alert in Germany
Armed, the Redstone carried a W39 warhead of multi-megaton yield to a maximum range of about 201 miles, and in the Hardtack Teak shot over the Pacific in 1958 it became the first American missile to fly a live nuclear warhead. The same year it deployed to West Germany with the 40th Field Artillery Group, joined a year later by the 46th; both were stood down in 1964. Chrysler assembled the missile at Warren, Michigan, Rocketdyne supplied the engine and Ford Instrument the ST-80 inertial guidance set.
Retirement, and what came after
Storable solid-fuelled missiles that needed no propellant loading made the Redstone obsolete. Production stopped in 1961, the MGM-31 Pershing took over the mission, and in October 1964 the missile was ceremonially retired at Redstone Arsenal. The surplus airframes were not scrapped: they became Jupiter-A and Jupiter-C test vehicles, Juno I and Mercury-Redstone space boosters and, in Australia, the Sparta — so the weapon kept flying for another decade under other names.