PRE-NOTS CALTECH ROCKET PROGRAMS AND THE FIRST EFFECTIVE COMBAT SYSTEM – THE BARRAGE ROCKET Editor’s note: Dr. Charles C. Lauritsen, a key leader in the founding of the Naval OrdnanceTest Station (NOTS) at China Lake, led CalTech in research in the early rocket projects some three years before the establishment of NOTS. The Lauritsen Laboratory at China Lake is named after Dr. Lauritsen, as is the Lauritsen Crater on the moon. The early work leading to the barrage rocket provided a template for many future programs at China Lake: Develop highly effective weapons in a short time that are easily produced and at low cost. Most of this material is taken fromVol. 1 of the China Lake history, Albert B. Christman, Sailors, Scientists, and Rockets. History of the NavalWeapons Center, China Lake, California,Volume 1. United States Government Printing Office. 1971. Until World War II, the U.S. Navy had shown but sporadic interest in rockets as weapons. The tide turned with the establishment of the rocket program at Caltech. Less by design than happenstance and mutual bias for solid propellants, the CalTech program became one sponsored almost entirely by the Navy. So close did this tie become that the true point of beginning for continuous Navy involvement in rocketry can be defined as the CalTech rocket program. The first CalTech rocket product was a target rocket, a rocket neither designed for nor used for combat. But it served two useful military purposes. First, over 21,000 military personnel sharpened their gunnery firing at these speedy, erratic targets. More important, it provides an uncomplicated vehicle for CalTech’s early experimental work with propellants. The dry extrusion process pioneered by CalTech led to the widely used double-base propellant formulations. The CalTech weapon to follow the target rocket was a 7.2-inch-diameter antisubmarine rocket (ASR) whose launchers became popularly known as the Mousetrap. By late 1942 the system was being extensively used along the Atlantic coast and in the Caribbean, and by early 1943 saw extended use in the Pacific theater. It goes down in history as the first CalTech rocket to be fired against the enemy. And since the CalTech program became the beginning of the Navy’s modern rocket program, the antisubmarine rockets launched from Mousetrap launchers were the first Navy rockets of the era to see tactical use. The next CalTech rocket was the retrorocket developed as the weapon partner to the submarine detection system known as MAD. It was the magnetic anomaly detector, later called the magnetic airborne detector, which gave a signal when flown over a mass of metal such as a submarine. The problem was that when the MAD gear told the pilot there was a submarine directly beneath him, it was too late to drop a bomb or depth charge. From the CalTech group came the idea in February 1942 of launching the ASR rocket rearward from the airplane at a velocity equal to the aircraft’s forward speed. According to theory, the projectile then should fall straight down. The retrorocket ASR was deployed by the spring of 1943, and by the end of the war, CalTech had produced 50,000 rounds, a large number for early in the war, but small compared to the total number of rockets produced. The Barrage Rocket The next rocket program to be started at CalTech grew out of a conversation on June 16, 1942, between Lauritsen andVice Admiral Wilson Brown, newly appointed Commander of the Amphibious Forces of the Pacific. Brown was attending a demonstration at Goldstone (a present day NASA tracking station on U.S. Army Ft. Irwin grounds, very near the east boundary of Echo Range) of the Mousetrap-launched ASR and other rockets. Vol. 16, No. 1 Newsletter of the China Lake Museum Foundation Winter 2010 Page 1 , OCR Text: PRE-NOTS CALTECH ROCKET PROGRAMS AND THE FIRST EFFECTIVE COMBAT SYSTEM – THE BARRAGE ROCKET Editor’s note: Dr. Charles C. Lauritsen, a key leader in the founding of the Naval OrdnanceTest Station (NOTS) at China Lake, led CalTech in research in the early rocket projects some three years before the establishment of NOTS. The Lauritsen Laboratory at China Lake is named after Dr. Lauritsen, as is the Lauritsen Crater on the moon. The early work leading to the barrage rocket provided a template for many future programs at China Lake: Develop highly effective weapons in a short time that are easily produced and at low cost. Most of this material is taken fromVol. 1 of the China Lake history, Albert B. Christman, Sailors, Scientists, and Rockets. History of the NavalWeapons Center, China Lake, California,Volume 1. United States Government Printing Office. 1971. Until World War II, the U.S. Navy had shown but sporadic interest in rockets as weapons. The tide turned with the establishment of the rocket program at Caltech. Less by design than happenstance and mutual bias for solid propellants, the CalTech program became one sponsored almost entirely by the Navy. So close did this tie become that the true point of beginning for continuous Navy involvement in rocketry can be defined as the CalTech rocket program. The first CalTech rocket product was a target rocket, a rocket neither designed for nor used for combat. But it served two useful military purposes. First, over 21,000 military personnel sharpened their gunnery firing at these speedy, erratic targets. More important, it provides an uncomplicated vehicle for CalTech’s early experimental work with propellants. The dry extrusion process pioneered by CalTech led to the widely used double-base propellant formulations. The CalTech weapon to follow the target rocket was a 7.2-inch-diameter antisubmarine rocket (ASR) whose launchers became popularly known as the Mousetrap. By late 1942 the system was being extensively used along the Atlantic coast and in the Caribbean, and by early 1943 saw extended use in the Pacific theater. It goes down in history as the first CalTech rocket to be fired against the enemy. And since the CalTech program became the beginning of the Navy’s modern rocket program, the antisubmarine rockets launched from Mousetrap launchers were the first Navy rockets of the era to see tactical use. The next CalTech rocket was the retrorocket developed as the weapon partner to the submarine detection system known as MAD. It was the magnetic anomaly detector, later called the magnetic airborne detector, which gave a signal when flown over a mass of metal such as a submarine. The problem was that when the MAD gear told the pilot there was a submarine directly beneath him, it was too late to drop a bomb or depth charge. From the CalTech group came the idea in February 1942 of launching the ASR rocket rearward from the airplane at a velocity equal to the aircraft’s forward speed. According to theory, the projectile then should fall straight down. The retrorocket ASR was deployed by the spring of 1943, and by the end of the war, CalTech had produced 50,000 rounds, a large number for early in the war, but small compared to the total number of rockets produced. The Barrage Rocket The next rocket program to be started at CalTech grew out of a conversation on June 16, 1942, between Lauritsen andVice Admiral Wilson Brown, newly appointed Commander of the Amphibious Forces of the Pacific. Brown was attending a demonstration at Goldstone (a present day NASA tracking station on U.S. Army Ft. Irwin grounds, very near the east boundary of Echo Range) of the Mousetrap-launched ASR and other rockets. Vol. 16, No. 1 Newsletter of the China Lake Museum Foundation Winter 2010 Page 1 , China Lake Museum,China Laker - Newsletter,China Laker 2010s,China Laker 2010,Vol+16+No+1+Winter+2010.pdf,Vol+16+No+1+Winter+2010.pdf Page 1, Vol+16+No+1+Winter+2010.pdf Page 1