Nord, North, Norte
by Thomas Hessler
After the Second World War, the United States acquired a substantial assemblage of German-built V-2 rockets. Altogether about 300 railcars worth of the very functional V-2 rockets were shipped to the White Sands Missile Range (WSMR) in New Mexico.
Scientists and technicians began to study the flight performance of these rockets. Typically, these launches would shoot the rockets from the southern end of the base toward the unpopulated areas north of it. However, once in 1948, a V-2 was accidentally launched in the opposite direction, in other words, from north to south.
It was 1948. The V-2 team assembled at White Sands consisted of the captured German scientists, local help (many of whom spoke Spanish as their first language), local gringo help (whose only language was English), and a mixture of other nationalities who had found their way into the U.S. technical arena via the Fermi Project or work at Los Alamos. The result was a virtual Babel of languages.
On a sunny day—in this part of the country they are all sunny—the team was to fire a V-2 from south to north, as had been done many times before. As a part of the shoot, the rocket was programmed to rise vertically immediately after ignition, and then to heel over, under power, into an attitude that would effect more-or-less horizontal travel. Horizontal travel is necessary as there is little more useless—or hazardous—than a rocket launching straight up and then falling straight down.
You can imagine, as part of the process, it is necessary for scientist A to instruct scientist B or helper B to perform those acts which result in the rocket taking some direction or another, hopefully the direction which has been chosen.
On this particular sunny day, something was lost in translation. Instructions were given, we must assume, but as they involved the routine abbreviations that develop over time, hand waving, and little more than pointing in one direction or another, technical requirements and directions spoken in German-to-English-to-Spanish did not translate with precision. We do not know where in the chain the miscue occurred but suspect it was English to Spanish.
The rocket launched at precisely 0800 hours. It rose vertically for the intended 7.3 seconds before it started its “heel,” translating to a trajectory 43 degrees from the horizontal into a precise 11.3 second burn before the rocket engines expired, the rocket now heading south. SOUTH??? Oh Shit! This particular remark was spoken simultaneously, in precision, and in at least five languages—an international expletive, if you will.
All they—the assembled “they”—could do was watch. And wonder.
Innocently, to the south, basking relatively peacefully in the morning sun, nestled El Paso and Juarez. A technical solution calculated for the horizontal distance, speed, and direction, correcting for the Earth’s curvature, and rotation but not wind, would place the V-2’s impact, somewhere in…Greater Juarez! Shit! Double shit! An International Incident!
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