First Un-manned spaceflight??

.....just dug this up and thought ya'll might find this an interesting read....

Pascal-B is an interesting footnote to the history of nuclear testing, and surprisingly - spaceflight.

The Pascal-B (originally named Galileo-B) was a near duplicate of the Pascal-A shot. It was another one-point criticality safety test, of the same basic primary stage design. Like Pascal-A it was fired in an open (unstemmed) shaft. One significant difference was that it had a concrete plug, similar to the concrete collimator used in Pacscal-A, but this time it was placed just above the device at the bottom of the shaft.

The close proximity of this plug to the bomb had an unanticipated side effect.

The Thunderwell Story

The February/March 1992 issue of Air & Space magazine, published by the Smithsonian, contained an article about nuclear rocket propulsion:

Overachiever
"Every kid who has put a firecracker under a tin can understands the principle of using high explosives to loft an object into space. What was novel to scientists at Los Alamos [the atomic laboratory in New Mexico] was the idea of using an atomic bomb as propellant. That strategy was the serendipitous result of an experiment that had gone somewhat awry.
"Project Thunderwell was the inspiration of astrophysicist Bob Brownlee, who in the summer of 1957 was faced with the problem of containing underground an explosion, expected to be equivalent to a few hundred tons of dynamite. Brownlee put the bomb at the bottom of a 500-foot vertical tunnel in the Nevada desert, sealing the opening with a four-inch thick steel plate weighing several hundred pounds. He knew the lid would be blown off; he didn't know exactly how fast. High-speed cameras caught the giant manhole cover as it began its unscheduled flight into history. Based upon his calculations and the evidence from the cameras, Brownlee estimated that the steel plate was traveling at a velocity six times that needed to escape Earth's gravity when it soared into the flawless blue Nevada sky. 'We never found it. It was gone,' Brownlee says, a touch of awe in his voice almost 35 years later.
"The following October the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, billed as the first man-made object in Earth orbit. Brownlee has never publicly challenged the Soviet's claim. But he has his doubts."

Although the shaft test goes unnamed in the article, only two shaft shots were fired before Sputnik was launched on 4 October 1957 - Pascal-A and Pascal-B. The nighttime Pascal-A shot could not have been the shot involved, since notably absent from the accounts of Pascal-A are the dazzlingly brilliant fireball streaking into the heavens that such an object would produce. Also Pascal-B was the only one of the two that was fired in summer as the article describes. This conclusion was confirmed to this author by Dr. Robert Brownlee, who has written expressly for this website his own account of this event.

TX-Cuda