CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Today the launch of Bumper 8 from Cape Canaveral barely registers as a small step on the nation's path toward space, and it certainly didn't result in any giant leaps of technology.

In fact, the July 24, 1950 flight was categorized as a failure.

Bumper 8 takes to the skies on July 24, 1950.

Initially the Army launched its missiles at White Sands, New Mexico. The rockets they were testing were all captured V 2 missiles built by Germany during World War 2.

Bumper began in the mid 1940s as a program to increase the altitude the missile could fly so science instruments could study the upper atmosphere. And if that experience enabled the military to deliver a warhead a much greater distance, then all the better.

Watch the video of the Bumper 8 launch.

Bumper's first stage was one of the V 2 missiles and its second stage a WAC Corporal rocket developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the same lab that would go on to explore the solar system for NASA.

Bumper 1 lifted off from New Mexico on May 15, 1948. However within two years, as the rockets traveled farther and were more prone to accidents -- including one famous incident where a rocket wound up in a Mexican cemetery -- officials began looking for a new place to launch where there was a lot more room.

Cape Canaveral was selected as the new site and a team of rocket scientists gathered to launch Bumper 7 on July 19, 1950. That launch, however, fizzled on the pad when a liquid oxygen valve froze.

Bumper 7 was taken off the launch pad and Bumper 8 erected on the pad on July 22, followed on July 23 with final checks and a launch rehearsal.

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Launch day on July 24 promised typically hot and humid Florida weather, with a chance of afternoon thunderstorms, so the liftoff was scheduled in the morning while visibility was still good.

"It was hot," Gray remembered, "and everybody was sweating it out."

Having seen in New Mexico all the possible results of a bad launch, Gray took little comfort for himself and his colleagues taking cover inside the small launch-control room located merely a few hundred feet from the launch pad.

The Blockhouse: The original "control room"

The control room "was no blockhouse," Gray said -- blockhouse being the term used for sturdier protective shelters -- noting that theirs was nothing more than three-quarter-inch (19-millimeter) plywood shack covered with 30-pound (14-kilogram) felt.

"The big problem was that if the missile got about 30 to 40 feet (9 to 12 meters) and then blew, well that so-called blockhouse...I don't think we'd have been around today," he said.

Bumper 8 lifted off at 9:28 a.m. Eastern Time, spewing orange flames and throwing sand and debris away from the launch pad as the V 2 missile climbed straight up with a roar that echoed across the Cape swamplands.

Although not as loud as future rockets that would be launched from Cape Canaveral, the first rocket to be launched from Florida was no less an impressive site.

The rocket quickly passed through a thin layer of clouds, its exhaust plume casting a shadow on the top of the clouds, and then observers on the ground quickly lost sight of the booster.

As part of the mission's test objectives, Bumper 8 pitched over so it climbed at an ever shallower angle, the idea being to test the effects of staging when the rocket was in near horizontal flight.

Eighty-three seconds after launch, with the rocket some 51,000 feet (15,545 meters) up and 15 miles (24 kilometers) downrange, the WAC Corporal fired its rocket engine and separated from the V 2 first stage.

Unfortunately, controllers did not get any indication that the WAC Corporal was accelerating and it is believed the upper stage broke up immediately after separation, continuing on an unknown distance before falling to the ocean.

The V 2 first stage, meanwhile, began its fall toward the Atlantic Ocean. After the rocket fell through 20,000 feet (6.095 meters), the range safety officer, Col. Harold Turner, destroyed the booster to make sure it would not endanger anyone or anything below.

The resulting debris fell harmlessly into the ocean some 48 miles (77 kilometers) downrange from the launch pad.

History was made -- although the men who worked on the launch didn't know it -- and after having worked at the launch pad for some two weeks straight, they were in no mood to celebrate a mission that had mixed results and kept them from their homes for so long.

"It was more like a 'flat-out' party, not a splashdown party," Gray said. "Everyone was so tired."