(Piction ID: 48063106 - Catalog: 14_025440)īack in 1954, Convair hired an ex-German V-2 rocket engineer named Krafft Arnold Ehricke (1917-1984) to perform conceptual studies of Atlas performance. Like Wernher von Braun, Ehricke was an alumnus of Hitler’s V-2 program but today is remembered as the father of the Atlas Centaur, a second-stage vehicle so versatile, reliable and efficient that variants are still in use 55 years later. This carefully staged publicity shot was probably conceived as PR “damage control” in the wake of Russia’s shocking success with Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, less than one week before this photo was taken. “See, we’re doing it, too!” Poker-faced rocketeer Krafft Ehricke with futuristic GD Astronautics satellite models on 10 October 1957. After Agena’s retirement in the summer of 1978, all Atlases were subsequently flown with the Centaur upper stage. It addition to the first five Mariner unmanned probes to Venus and Mars, the first interplanetary fly-bys, and the Ranger and Lunar Orbiter unmanned moon probes, Atlas Agena was used even more extensively for launching classified DoD payloads. Atlas Agena was launched 109 times during its 18-year career, with an 85 percent success rate. Agena sat atop an Atlas D lower “stage and a half” configuration and, combined, provided two and a half stages of rocket power. First launched in 1960, Agena was an expendable upper-stage launch system (ELS) developed by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation.
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