On this day in space! Nov. 24, 1947: 1st Aerobee sounding rocket launch

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On November 24, 1947, the U.S. Navy launched the first Aerobee rocket.

On November 24, 1947, the U.S. Navy launched the first Aerobee rocket. Aerobee was a suborbital sounding rocket designed to study Earth's atmosphere.

An Aerobee suborbital sounding rocket of the type designed to study Earth's atmosphere. (Image credit: NMMSH)

Those tests used a dummy version of Aerobee with a live booster to see if the two stages would separate properly. On Aerobee's first real flight, the rocket flew about 35 miles high. Mission control cut the flight short after about 30 seconds, because Aerobee started to yaw, and they wanted to keep it from going completely out of control. More than 1,000 Aerobee rockets have launched since then, and the last one flew in January of 1985.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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