Picture a balloon.
It drifts peacefully upwards in the sky, a gentle breeze helping it along its way.
It floats higher and higher, until it’s surrounded by fluffy white clouds.
A passing seagull gives it a curious eye before moving on.
And then, a rocket ignites, shoots right through the balloon,
and tears upwards into the atmosphere!
That might sound outlandish.
But it’s actually a real thing that’s been happening for 70 years!
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Not to be confused with a raccoon, a rockoon is
the combination of a rocket and a balloon.
And it can actually be a fast, easy, and cheap way to get rockets off the ground.
The balloon carries the rocket past the lowest,
thickest layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Then, when it’s high enough, the rocket launches upwards,
right through the balloon, to achieve a higher altitude than it could by itself.
This gets the rocket past the Earth’s lower atmosphere
without needing a specialized launch facility.
Most heavy payloads are still going to start off from a launchpad.
But for small payloads and light duty research rockets, balloons are just the ticket.
More than that, without balloons,
we may never have been able to get people to space safely.
Back in the late 1940s, researchers were interested in using balloons
to launch sounding rockets: rockets equipped with scientific instruments
to collect information from the upper atmosphere.
These rockets helped them learn more about
everything from weather to gravity to radiation.
The first functioning rockoon used a class of rocket called a DEACON:
a vertical sounding rocket that was originally meant to carry
about 20 kilograms of equipment, to about 32 kilometers off the ground.
In August of 1952, the DEACON rockoon launched off the coast of Greenland,
sent by a team of researchers from the University of Iowa
that included James A. Van Allen.
With the help of the balloon, the DEACON rocket
made it to an altitude of almost 64 kilometers.
That’s nearly double what it would have been capable of reaching from the ground.
Van Allen was looking for cosmic radiation in the atmosphere.
This radiation comes from all over the universe,
mostly from far beyond our solar system.
And like most forms of radiation, it could be dangerous
for any living thing exposed to it.
That meant, if we were ever going to launch living things into outer space,
we needed to learn how to protect them.
Using DEACON rockoons, other balloon-launched experiments,
and the U.S.’s earliest satellites, Van Allen and his team
measured the cosmic radiation surrounding the Earth.
He ultimately discovered two “belts” of radiation that
surround the Earth, named the Van Allen belts in his honor.
The Van Allen belts are two massive areas of cosmic radiation that
look sort of like a giant Venn diagram, enveloping the Earth.
Our planet’s magnetic field actually traps radiation in the upper atmosphere,
keeping it away from the lower atmosphere and the Earth’s surface.
This protects us down on the ground from being harmed by radiation.
But it’s a problem for anyone looking to get into space.
The discovery of the Van Allen belts helped researchers figure out
how to navigate through the spots where the radiation was weakest,
so astronauts could avoid as much of the harmful radiation as possible.
This knowledge protected the astronauts of NASA’s Apollo 8 mission in 1968,
the first crewed spaceship to fly past the Van Allen belts.
And it’s continued to protect sensitive scientific equipment,
living organisms, and astronauts in the decades since.
Not bad for a project that started with a tiny rocket hitched to a balloon!
Rockoons were used in all sorts of groundbreaking research throughout the 1950s.
With the height of the Cold War, the U.S. and the Soviet Union
competed fiercely to reach new advances in space technology first.
Rockoons helped fuel this research, reaching higher and higher for
new discoveries in cosmic radiation,
the space between planets, and other important data.
In 1957, a set of rockoons reached a mindblowing height
of almost six and a half thousand kilometers.
That’s one hundred times the altitude that the first rockoon achieved.
It pushes past what we call the “edge of space,”
into the outermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere: so thin it’s barely there at all.
Rockoons had their downsides, though.
While a balloon could help gain altitude, it also couldn’t really be steered.
That’s why most rockoon launches were conducted miles away from land.
Far from being able to accidentally fall on something important.
Or some one!
In an effort to remedy this issue, the next development in
rocket launching technology was the “rockaire.”
After all, if you can use a balloon to launch a rocket, why not an aircraft?
In the late 50s, researchers started to experiment with this idea,
but it never really took off.
Rockaires never achieved the same exciting altitudes as rockoons,
and were never used for major scientific research,
so the idea was quickly abandoned.
Of course, the heyday of the rockoon did eventually come to an end.
With the advent of sounding rockets that could reach higher altitudes on their own,
launching from a balloon became an unnecessary step.
These days, NASA’s sounding rockets can reach altitudes of 1300 kilometers.
And for research that needs a more zoomed-out view,
satellites launched into Earth’s orbit can give us the data we need.
But rockoons still played an incredible role in our early space research.
And they’re actually still used today!
Many small, lightweight satellites are launched with rockoons,
since it’s much cheaper than a whole rocket launch.
Researchers are still working on improving the design of rockoons
to make them even better at what they do.
By refining the technology, scientists hope to
make rockoons cheaper, faster, and more reliable.
And it’s all thanks to that DEACON rocket, launched into the Arctic air in 1952.
So next time you picture a rocket launch,
maybe the image won’t be a giant spaceship taking off from Cape Canaveral.
Maybe it’ll be a tiny research rocket, floating up into the clouds,
attached to humankind’s original flying machine: a humble balloon.
Or if you prefer, you don’t even have to picture it,
because the DEACON rockoon is our SciShow pin of the month!
We thought a rocket that blasts into space by way of a balloon would be
a great thing to attach to your bag strap, jacket, or pin board, so we made one.
We’re accepting preorders for this pin all month,
and then once the month is up we’ll manufacture,
ship, and get started on the next one.
Which means right now is your only chance to get this one!
If you’re interested, check out the link in the description below,
and thanks for watching.
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