Picture a balloon drifting 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!
This might sound outlandish, but it’s actually a real thing that’s been happening for 70 years! Not to be confused with a raccoon, a rockoon is the combination of a rocket and a balloon. It can be a fast, easy, and cheap way to get rockets off the ground, as 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, 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 an incredible height of almost 6,500 kilometers, which is 100 times the altitude of the first rockoon. This altitude pushes past what we call the “edge of space,” into the outermost layer of Earth’s atmosphere. Rockoons had their downsides though, as a balloon could not be steered, so launches had to be conducted miles away from land. To remedy this issue, the next development in rocket launching technology was the “rockaire”, which used an aircraft to launch a rocket. However, the rockaire was never used for major scientific research and eventually the heyday of the rockoon came to an end. Nowadays, NASA’s sounding rockets can reach altitudes of 1300 kilometers and satellites are used to get the data we need. Rockoons are still used today to launch small, lightweight satellites, as it is much cheaper than a whole rocket launch. Scientists are still working on improving the design of rockoons to make them cheaper, faster and more reliable.
To commemorate this incredible technology, the DEACON rockoon is our SciShow pin of the month. We are accepting preorders for this pin all month, and once the month is up, we’ll manufacture, ship and get started on the next one. If you’re interested, check out the link in the description below, and thanks for watching.