Museum Offers Glimpse Of U.s. Rocketry History

June 19, 1986|By John J. Glisch of The Sentinel Staff

CAPE CANAVERAL — When most people go to a junkyard, they usually leave with an auto part. When Don Engel went, he came home with a rocket.

Most of the technology he helped save from military graveyards is on display at the Air Force Space Museum, providing a glimpse at the hardware used in the fledgling days of the U.S. space program.

''Most of what we got was scrounged from one place or another,'' said Engel, the last full-time curator of the museum at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. ''There were still a lot of artifacts out there and some of it was in pretty good shape.''

The museum is just a few hundred yards from Launch Complex 5/6, where Alan Shepard blasted off aboard a Redstone rocket 25 years ago to begin America's manned exploration of space.

The grounds also served as the site for other important launches in preceding years, including the liftoff of the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, and research flights carrying chimpanzees named Ham and Gordo, whose brief fling with fame landed them in Life magazine.

Yet even with its important role in history, the aging museum remains a neglected stepchild to the modern Spaceport USA, which annually draws millions of visitors to Kennedy Space Center.

The Air Force museum is often empty unless it is included as part of tours offered by the space center, which can send as many as 30,000 people through the museum's doors a week. Its two buildings also are ugly ducklings compared with the gleaming Spaceport.

In all, the museum lacks money, a problem that has plagued it since its inception.

Nonetheless, the grounds offer a rare and unique view of the rocketry of the late 1940s and 1950s that helped establish the space program and gave scientists and engineers the knowledge to send man into orbit and to the moon. Included in the nearly 50 outdoor displays is a World War II German V-1, or buzz bomb, which terrorized London in the closing months of the conflict. Military rockets such as the Snark, Rascal, Hound Dog, Juno and Jupiter also are exhibited.

''With the possible exception of the National Air and Space Museum, we have more rockets and boosters than any other museum in the country,'' Engel said. Blockhouses used as launch control rooms have been restored and filled with antiquated computer equipment that appears primitive compared with the complex machines now used for space flight.

''Most of the functions these rooms full of equipment performed could now be done by computers the size of a desk top,'' Engel said.

The museum was established in 1966 by Brig. Gen. Harry Sands Jr., a commander of Patrick Air Force Base who secured the site in 1964 after it was mothballed by the government.

People such as Engel then took over, searching for rocketry that had become outdated almost as soon as it was delivered from the factory. What they found were battered relics in military junkyards and dusty contractor warehouses.

Restoring the rockets was a difficult process complicated by the the museum's closing during the mid-1970s after the Apollo program ended and public interest in space waned.

''Most people can't relate to what we started out with and what we have now,'' said volunteer guide James Bullock. ''The technological jump is phenomenal and we just take it for granted.''

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