Welcome to the Scale WAC Corporal Gallery on TRF.
This gallery showcases the WAC Corporal and those rockets derived from it. Particularly appropriate in this thread are the following:
Aerospace Specialty Products (ASP): 18mm WAC Corporal: KWAC-18
Aerospace Specialty Products (ASP): 38mm WAC Corporal: KWAC-29 or KWAC-38
Aerospace Specialty Products (ASP): Micro WAC Corporal: KWAC-MM
Estes: WAC Corporal: K-11 or #1211
Rocket R&D: WAC Corporal:
Semroc: WAC Corporal: KD-1
Thrustline: WAC Corporal: TACL-014
as well as any upscales, downscales, clones, kitbashes or other derivative works. Even Goonies qualify!
The WAC or WAC Corporal was the first sounding rocket developed in the United States. Begun as a spinoff of the Corporal program, the WAC was a "little sister" to the larger Corporal. It was designed and built jointly by the Douglas Aircraft Company and the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory.
The WAC Corporal was a liquid-fuel rocket, with fuming nitric acid and aniline used as oxidizers and furfuryl alcohol as fuel, launched with the help of a solid fuel Tiny Tim booster.
The first WAC Corporal dummy round was launched on September 16, 1945 from White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces, New Mexico. After a White Sands V-2 rocket had reached 69 miles on May 10, a White Sands WAC Corporal reached 80 km (49 mi) on May 22, 1946 — the first U.S.-designed rocket to reach the edge of space (under the U.S. definition of space at the time). On February 24, 1949, a Bumper (a German V-2 rocket acting as first stage) bearing a WAC Corporal at White Sands accelerated to 5,150 mph to become the first flight of more than five times the speed of sound.
Scientists were later surprised when almost a year after the launch, tail fragments of the WAC Corporal rocket that reached 5,150 mph and an altitude of over 250 miles, were found and identified in the New Mexico desert near the launch site.
A few WAC Corporals survive in museums, including one at the National Air and Space Museum and another in the White Sands Missile Range Museum.
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