WAC Corporal

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 hypergolic liquid-fuel rocket. Fuming nitric acid was the oxidizer and a mixture of aniline and furfuryl alcohol (with the later addition of hydrazine) was the fuel. It was launched by 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 111 kilometres (69 mi) on May 10, a White Sands WAC Corporal reached 80 kilometres (50 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 8,290 kilometres per hour (5,150 mph) to become the first flight of more than five times the speed of sound.