U of Mās first successful flight is described in The New Yorker and later in a book by Daniel Lang (Early Tales of the Atomic Age, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York, 1948):
Stocker Sturgeon was the air-bottle man from the University of Michigan. Sturgeon smiled miserably when White told me that he had been nicknamed, inevitably, Virgin, because he had come to White Sands for four shoots but had yet to be successful with his air bottle. Once the missile had not gone up high enough, twice it had failed to rise, and on Sturgeonās last attempt the shoot had been cancelled, because of a bad accident at the launching site. Alongside Sturgeon was his bottle, which was made of steel and was thirty-two inches long and eight inches in diameter. It was shaped like a fire extinguisher except for a long nozzle, which, I was told, would protrude form No. 27 during its flight, in order to suck in the atmosphere sample. The bottle was painted bright yellow to help Kincannon find it, and on it, in black paint, were the words ćRETURN TO UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, WILLOW RUN, MICHIGAN. ATT: M.H. NICKEL SHIP RR. EXPRESS CHARGES GUARANTEEDä (Weeks 23).
V-2 number 27ās flight was successful, and the bottle was recovered and taken back to Ann Arbor for analysis. All in all, about 70 bottles were sent aloft, and only about half of them yielded useful air.
On another occasion, one of the rockets carrying Michigan experiments traveled to a height of just 50 feet before tipping, leveling off, and then crashing straight into the ground about 300 feet from a large group of spectators. As a result, large audiences were never again allowed at the launch site. The Michigan engineers were disappointed, but comforted by the fact that their experiments had worked perfectly for the entire 12 seconds of flight. They reconstructed their equipment and launched successfully two months later.
One of the reasons for many of the V-2 failures
was discovered by an engineer from UM named Bob Ohlsson. Apparently,
the copper wiring inside the rocket engine was very brittle. It turned
out that the rockets had only been designed for a 3-month lifetime during
the war, and had been constructed carelessly due to Germanyās lack of funds
and materials. Professor Dow recommended that the rockets be rewired,
but that cost $16,000 a rocket. After two more expensive failures,
the Panel decided that rewiring the rockets was a good idea and proceeded
with implementation of the change.
