Wernher von Braun himself disliked Atlas and Centaur’s “balloon” concept and the use of cryogenic fuels, which he considered too dangerous. The second launch six months later succeeded, but a rash of additional failures very nearly derailed the program. Surveyor was one of NASA’s greatest achievements of the early lunar and interplanetary exploration period.įunded since January 1959, the first Atlas Centaur, AC-1, was launched on on Atlas 104D and was spectacularly unsuccessful. The first of seven Surveyor robotic spacecraft sent to collect data (in-cluding 11,000 photographs) over a period of 30 days for the proposed Apollo moon landing, Surveyor 1 was the first spacecraft to make a soft lunar landing, using retro-rockets to slow the lander from 6,000 to 3 mph for a soft touch-down. , Atlas Centaur AC-10 launches the Surveyor 1 spacecraft from Pad 36A at Cape Canaveral. The horse symbolized the Atlas 1-1/2 stage lower “workhorse” booster, while the man portion symbolized the “intelligent” upper stage. Ehricke, known as the father of Centaur, named his creation for the halfman / half-horse creature of Greek mythology. One or two Rocketdyne RL10 engines burning liquid oxygen (LOX) and liquid hydrogen (LH2) made Centaur the world’s first high-energy upper-stage rocket, one which enabled NASA to launch some of its most important scientific missions over the next 50 years. They all agreed that liquid oxygen (LOX) / liquid hydrogen (LA2) rocket engines were the most promising solution to the propellant question for “higher-end” applications.Ĭonvair’s second-stage concept, ushered into hardware by Ehricke, was basically a smaller version of the Atlas rocket itself, using the same pressurized balloon-tank concept. Ehricke also opined that Atlas would need a second-stage rocket in order to be useful for deeper space missions, so in 1956 he and a small group of Convair engineers began to study the problem in earnest.
Ehricke, who had worked with Wernher von Braun at Peenemünde and later at Red Stone Arsenal, concluded that Atlas, based on the data, was capable of boosting itself into orbit, which it later did with the Project SCORE satellite. (Piction ID: 48063106 - Catalog: 14_025440)īack in 1954, Convair hired an ex-German V-2 rocket engineer named Krafft Arnold Ehricke (1917-1984) to perform conceptual studies of Atlas performance. Like Wernher von Braun, Ehricke was an alumnus of Hitler’s V-2 program but today is remembered as the father of the Atlas Centaur, a second-stage vehicle so versatile, reliable and efficient that variants are still in use 55 years later. This carefully staged publicity shot was probably conceived as PR “damage control” in the wake of Russia’s shocking success with Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, less than one week before this photo was taken.
“See, we’re doing it, too!” Poker-faced rocketeer Krafft Ehricke with futuristic GD Astronautics satellite models on 10 October 1957. After Agena’s retirement in the summer of 1978, all Atlases were subsequently flown with the Centaur upper stage. It addition to the first five Mariner unmanned probes to Venus and Mars, the first interplanetary fly-bys, and the Ranger and Lunar Orbiter unmanned moon probes, Atlas Agena was used even more extensively for launching classified DoD payloads. Atlas Agena was launched 109 times during its 18-year career, with an 85 percent success rate. Agena sat atop an Atlas D lower “stage and a half” configuration and, combined, provided two and a half stages of rocket power. First launched in 1960, Agena was an expendable upper-stage launch system (ELS) developed by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation.
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