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Overview of 1962 launches from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Starts with Atlas #544, the 105th Atlas launch, and the last R&D Atlas launch. Also shows a Minuteman ICBM destroyed by the Range Safety Officer during a night launch, and a Skybolt missile launch from a B-52.
Later, the May 9, 1962 explosion of the 1st Atlas-Centaur launch vehicle, with its LH2-LOX Centaur upper stage, bears a distinct resemblance to the STS-51L Challenger explosion.
After showing Project Mercury launches, continues with the SA-3 Saturn I launch of November 16, 1962, and a description of the soon to be canceled Dyna-Soar.
Also see: Cape Canaveral 1968
Public domain film from the US Air Force Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) is an installation of the United States Air Force Space Command’s 45th Space Wing, headquartered at nearby Patrick Air Force Base. Located on Cape Canaveral in the state of Florida, CCAFS is the primary launch head of America’s Eastern Range with three launch pads currently active. (Space Launch Complexes 37-B, 40, and 41) Popularly known as “Cape Kennedy” from 1963 to 1973, and as “Cape Canaveral” from 1949 to 1963 and from 1973 to the present, the facility is south-southeast of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on adjacent Merritt Island, with the two linked by bridges and causeways. The Cape Canaveral AFS Skid Strip provides a 10,000-foot (3,000 m) runway[6] close to the launch complexes for military airlift aircraft delivering heavy and outsized payloads to the Cape.
A number of American space exploration “firsts” were launched from CCAFS, including the first U.S. Earth satellite (1958), first U.S. astronaut (1961), first U.S. astronaut in orbit (1962), first two-man U.S. spacecraft (1965), first U.S. unmanned lunar landing (1966), and first three-man U.S. spacecraft (1968). It was also the launch site for all of the first spacecraft to (separately) fly past each of the planets in the Solar System (1962–1977), the first spacecraft to orbit Mars (1971) and roam its surface (1996), the first American spacecraft to orbit and land on Venus (1978), the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn (2004), and to orbit Mercury (2011), and the first spacecraft to leave the Solar System (1977)…
