Thor Rocket - How A 'Temporary Solution' Became America's Most Popular Launch Vehicle

Thor was one of the US's first launch vehicles, it launched the first spacecraft for NASA and hundreds of Spy Satellites for the US Military. It would become the Delta, and also the most launched rocket in US history, but it started out as a humble ballistic missile which didn't even have the range to hit targets in the USSR without being stationed on its doorstep.
A lot of this history is thanks to the work of Ed Kyle, sadly his website no longer exists but the wayback machine has the all important Thor/Delta History
web.archive.org/web/202203210...
Some of the video used here has been remastered by RetroSpaceHD - check out their channel for more historic movies.
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[@bryanwilson8652]

Finally, something else that comes up when I google “Thor Rocket” that isn’t related to a buff blonde man and a raccoon.

[@AadidevSooknananNXS]

Beat me to it!

[@drunkpaulocosta9301]

@@AadidevSooknananNXS didnt beat Scott to it as its the first thing he says in the video basically

[@baconpancakes1752]

Kinky...

[@theussmirage]

Funny you mention that, as both things you mentioned show up 15 seconds into this video!

[@blingbling574]

I was expecting a piece of cheese

[@JAMoore-zz3ki]

For those curious about the t-shirt...... It's referring to all the ways you can die in a video game called The Long Dark, by a company called Hinterland Studios. Hinterland also sells the t-shirt. (Or at least they did, pre-pandemic. No idea what their status is now.)

[@Lucius_Chiaraviglio]

I was going to say, that's a pretty dire shirt.

[@lenajesse]

Thank you🙂 I kept staring at the shirt and was really puzzled 😄 I don't play the game so my best guess was "all the ways you can die if you travel" ...or go outside" 😄

[@catfish552]

Very nice, thank you! I'd assumed it was something like that, but I guessed Oregon Trail.

[@Tfaonc]

I thought it was going to be a "xxxxx can kill me, but names will never hurt me" kind of thing.

[@gsnedders_legacy]

Ahhhhhhh! Well that makes a lot of sense. (Also a game I need to go back and play more of!)

[@My3nMy4]

Going a little further down the rabbit hole - Telstar 1, which was launched on a Thor Delta (DM-19), was killed by the Starfish test which itself was launched by a Thor. The God of Thunder giveth, the God of Thunder take the away…

[@WWeronko]

Any decision of the Thor IRBM should include is sister rocket the Jupiter IRBM. The sibling rivalry between the two developments for which was two nearly identical rockets was legendary. The Jupiter team, under the direction of Wernher von Braun built the better more reliable rocket initially. The Jupiter program was more successful due to far better testing and preparations. The Jupiter missiles were also used in a series of suborbital biological test flights. The Saturn I and Saturn IB rockets were manufactured by using a single Jupiter propellant tank, in combination with eight Redstone rocket propellant tanks clustered around it, to form a powerful first stage launch vehicle. It could be said Saturn I and IB were derivatives of the Jupiter program. The Jupiter MRBM was also modified by adding upper stages, in the form of clustered Sergeant-derived rockets, to create a space launch vehicle called Juno II. It launched Pioneer 3, Pioneer 4, Explorer 7, Explorer 8, and Explorer 11. One of the two rocket programs would have been canceled due to their near identical performance and Thor having the significant higher failure rate probably would have been the canceled program. However, after the Soviet launches of Sputnik 1-2 in late 1957, US Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson announced that both Thor and Jupiter would go into service as his final act before leaving office. This was both out of fear of Soviet capabilities and also to avoid political repercussions from the workplace layoffs that would result at either Douglas or Chrysler if one of the two missiles were canceled. All very interesting rocket history.

[@topsecret1837]

Jupiter was a much more expensive rocket though. It was very similar to Thor but aside from a handful of launches it didn’t have a success rate that justified continuing launching it for that price after 1963.

[@mydogbrian4814]

> A von Braun *Saturn-1* derivative could have put a 15 ton Pioneer-1 satellite into earth orbit in 1957. If the US would have backed the Army Redstone Team with the same funding as the Air Force Atlas Team. - It was all about the clustered booster aproch using the well tested & operational Redstone. The same technique that, instead put the Russians into the history books. - And Space history would have been completely different.

[@advorak8529]

@@mydogbrian4814 Like the N1.

[@Roguescienceguy]

If Wernher were to somehow be resurrected I can only Imagine what he would say about the way things are being handled these days. Pretty sure that some very strong German swearwords would be used

[@the18thdoctor3]

@@mydogbrian4814 uh… what? Maybe you mean the Juno I, and maybe you mean 15 kilograms. And the Juno I’s clustering was on the upper stages.

[@Fred_Bender]

My father worked for Chrysler aerospace from 1958 through the end of Skylab . He started with NACA working at Langley AFB .He assisted with development of grooved runways for jets .Every time I drive on grooved pavement I am reminded of his contribution.I still have his old Chrysler hard hat,Skylab Medal and NACA pin.

[@judet2992]

Dude that’s some sick physical artifacts for his memory!

[@cliffwhite5963]

My father, Col. RW Walton (Ret), was the launch coordinator of the first all military crew to put a satellite in orbit (wx sat for Russian air space SAC). The sat was on a Thor our to Vandenberg on March 17, 1965. I was 15 yo and had no clue of that compliment as it was classified. I have a photo of the Thor on the launch pad.

[@jamiewilliams5134]

Nice that you mentioned Telstar. We at Goonhilly are celebrating 60 years since that first transatlantic communications test via satellite, which we received with our aerial 1(GHY1).

[@robertburns8597]

Thanks Scott, for putting this together. I worked on the Block5d DMSP Weather satellite program in 79-81. We launched the Thor from SLC 10 West at Vandenberg AFB. I was the upper stage console operator. One of 25 blue suit enlisted launch crew members I the AF, I had 3 stripes! My all time favorite job!

[@samsonsoturian6013]

There is nothing more permanent than temporary situations.

[@44R0Ndin]

Works in IT, works in spaceflight, after all they have a lot of overlap.

[@simongeard4824]

There's an infamous comment in the codebase I work on, to the effect of "if this is still here in a year's time, I'll eat my hat". That was written about twenty years ago.

[@advorak8529]

Temporary building structures like Quonset huts.

[@44R0Ndin]

@@simongeard4824 Reminds me of the "temporary" ethernet cable I ran from the router to my computer in my bedroom when we first got high-speed internet. I promised my parents it would be temporary, but it stayed there for about 2 years before I finally ran the cable thru the walls properly. Such things are also pretty much the norm when renting a living space, since you can't just do what you need to do to route the cable properly, so it gets temporarily stuck up with tape wherever it will hopefully stay out of the way. Ugly yes, but the situation demands it, and no you really shouldn't be relying on wi-fi especially in an apartment building because you just know that's gonna be a very crowded RF band so the throughput will be terrible and the ping will be all over the place, instead of the steady ping that you need for things like gaming and high throughput you need for things like making Netflix and other streaming services work. To this day I don't get why people settle for WiFi connections for their expensive gaming PC's. They always say "it can't be done". That's never the case. There is always a solution, even if it might be a bit ugly.

[@44R0Ndin]

@@advorak8529 Yes, go look at Boca Chica and try to tell me those tents were meant to be there for as long as they have been. I doubt that was the in"tent". If they were meant to be there for as long as they have been, they would have likely been made of some sort of metal, and it's not like they couldn't do that since they get so much stainless steel shipped in, all they'd really need is the girders (and they're getting girders shipped in to build things like the launch tower and the high bay, so those supply lines are also already in place). I guess the time it takes to convert to a more permanent structure instead of the tents just hasn't been available. Or maybe I'm full of crap and they intended those tents to be permanent structures, at least permanent enough that they would be there for going on 3 or more years now.

[@Papershields001]

A couple years ago I was working right next to Goddard and a snowstorm was about to hit so everything was closed and there was nobody around. I went and got a sub on my lunch break and snuck around back into the Rocket garden behind the visitor’s center and ate a meatball sub using their entire stacked Thor Delta as a parasol. Good times. Cool looking rocket. 10 out of 10 would trespass again.

[@roderickreilly9666]

A friend of mine, the late Dick Morrison, helped develop that original Thor in record time. Morrison was one of America's post WWII rocket pioneers.

[@glhx2112]

Thanks for this episode ! I spent the last 8 years of my USAF career stationed at Vandenberg AFB, and was able to explore all of those old Thor launch sites shown in your video. A surprising amount of the old Thor (And Atlas) launch infrastructure was still present when I left the base back in the mid 2000's. Some of the launch sites were re-purposed for other programs. I did not know about Ground Guidance being used, that is new to me, but, I do know Atlas used that system, or, at at least some of the old Atlas systems did.

[@scottmanley]

Ground vs Onboard navigation is something that changed over time as technology advanced and requirements changed.

[@matthewmartin5763]

Even after watching Scott for nearly 10 years, starting with KSP tutorials; I still want to fire up the game and play. Especially when he does videos on early US rockets like these. Scott, I credit you with my ever growing knowledge of orbital mechanics. You taught me WTH hyper-golic fuel is. And, so much more. I could go on and on. I think I speak for a majority of your viewers when I say that I appreciate all you do to help educate people on really complicated stuff.

[@r0cketplumber]

After that nuke launch failure, Johnston island became the world's only open-cast plutonium mine.

[@dewayneblue1834]

Such unique looks on those stub-nosed Thor-DM18As, as well as the long 'lance' on the Thor-Able 2s. Definitely icons of the early Space Age.

[@bhaskararaka]

Nothing more permanent than a “temporary solution”

[@Carstuff111]

This is one of many reasons I love this channel, thank you as always for the content!

[@Tool-Meister]

Love Scott’s accent. Makes him sounding like he’s saying “Exploder VI”. Might be more accurate that way!

[@rocketmentor]

If anyone wants to see the LR-79 Thor liquid booster thrust chamber I moved several of the LR-79 TCAs to the Saxon Aerospace Museum in Boron, CA out in front which can be seen from HWY 58 as you drive by, and a complete LR-79 engine with turbo pumps is at the New Mexico Museum of Aerospace History near Alamogordo NM outside at the entrance to the museum building. These engines were part of the SEALAR program by Bob Truax which I was the senior engineer. Ken

[@RCAvhstape]

7:28 that Lockheed ad for the Agena stage is classic. You could do a whole video about the Agena, which was a real workhorse for America in the early days of spaceflight.

[@MIflyer5124]

I was the last USAF Thor Program Manager. The last launch was in 1980 and we shut the program down in 1981 because the final Thor payload, DMSP Block 5D-2, had gotten larger and heavier and moved on to converted Atlas E ICBMs. The mandatory use of the Shuttle meant that no one was designing payloads capable of being launched by Thor, and although I often heard the claim that, "There are payloads out there for Thor but you are just not looking for them hard enough!" that was not just true. You would have thought there were homeless people wandering the streets with spacecraft under their arms, people who would have been healthy, happy and productive if they could have just found a rocket. When we shut the program down we had four intact LV-2D boosters, basically the last of the SM-75's brought back from England, and five SLV-2A boosters. We also had an LV-2D fuel tank engine section and an SLV-2H fuel tank and engine section; the LOX tanks from those boosters had been used in ground tests to determine the vulnerability of ballistic missiles to lasers. After the loss of the Shuttle Challenger in 1986 the latest built engines from two of the SLV-2A were used for Delta boosters and the turbine wheels were removed from all of the other Thor MB-3 Block I and Block III engines in order to enable new RS-27 engines to be built for Delta boosters. It had been so long since we had built new MB-3 or RS-27 engines that the company that made the turbine wheels had gone out of business.

[@rustygear447]

Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution

[@orbitalair2103]

OK Scott, I expect a full 30 min video on the Delta series !!! I worked for Thiokol Huntsville from 87-92, as a Project Engineer (1 of 3) in the Castor Office. Then we were working CastorIVa for the 6900 series. We helped launched GPS. I was on pad17b helping McDac prep for the first launch (my first business trip) of DeltaII with Castor IVAs. IIRC we built over 210 CastorIVAs for DeltaII, with 100% success. Those CastorI motors were bleeding edge, they would burn out all the insulation and then about 1/4" of steel on the nozzle - talk about maximum impulse and minimum dead weight. We had a great team, but they wanted it all moved to Utah, so they shut us down.

[@petera6984]

I'm 68...This stuff is what I grew up with. Love it!

[@petequintanilla4237]

Scott’s tee shirt sounds like me when I’m calling in sick to work.

[@Arational]

Interesting bucket list t-shirt

[@VictorDeVandenesse]

Very nice video on a not very famous rocket but mostly important for early US space program. There is the awesome KSP mod BlueDogDesignBureau that have all it's variants and payloads up to the Delta IV

[@fuzzyhead878]

I have BDB and FASA. Love both mods. I’ve been using them to create crazy Gemini/Apollo derived vehicles.

[@aledandrian]

I love videos like this about the history of launch systems, please keep making more of them

[@jsfriedberg]

Outstanding video. I remember the Thor / Delta for its reliability in so many different roles. What tremendous value its team delivered over the years! Thank you, Scott, for highlighting this important piece of our nation's technological and security history.

[@Tomyironmane]

I just love how the engine designation on the one upper stage started with XLR8. Someone has a sense of humor.

[@61Ldf]

Scott, another excellent video with Ed Kyle’s detailed drawings.

[@sporg]

Wonderful video as always, Scott. Great to see the Thor getting its story told in detail: there are so many early shots of Thor failures -- many on or near the launchpad -- that its later successes are often overlooked.

[@jasonplant5432]

I absolutely love your channel.Mr Manley. Great stuff EVERYTIME.

[@orbitalair2103]

Great video Scott. Awesome pics and videos of launches.

[@sonnyburnett8725]

Thanks Scott, loved this review of the Thor booster history. You obviously did your homework on this. Awesome video.

[@canadianragin]

I love how bluedog design bureau provides some of the top-quality Thor images

[@bioriderfc]

Thank you and Ed Kyle.

[@richb313]

Thanks Scott for another history lesson in the development of rockets and their uses from the start until now.

[@msimpson54]

Scott can you do something about the “Titan” family? There is quite a bit out there about Gemini and the Titan 2 GLV but I can’t find much about Titan 3 and 4 that’s not rubbish or in about 140P xD

[@jmwoods190]

And while we're doing it- Add honorable mentions for the unbuilt LDC variants that have 4 engines on the 1st core stage with 2-4 SRMs aka Titans 3L2 & 3L4. The 3L4 would've had equal thrust to STS!

[@RCAvhstape]

Not to mention the Titan V, which was used by Zephram Cochrane to launch his prototype warp drive spacecraft.

[@jackandersen1262]

Note that sometime in all of this the Agena D would have a propellant sump system allowing for main engine restart without ullage.

[@HowP88]

If electric toothbrushes could fly

[@GerardHammond]

Lots of great stuff here. A mini deep dive into Thor

[@kevinturner6281]

Thanks for the video Scott, just wanted to correct you when you said that Thor missiles were launched from silo's in the UK, they were not, they were stored horizontally on a launch pad covered in a collapsible structure that would be retracted prior to the missile being raised vertically and fuelled prior to launch

[@petesheppard1709]

This was a very nice addition to my knowledge of the early space program (which I followed avidly as a kid). Thanks!!

[@cooperthompson4850]

Finally,The thor video. I've waited so long.

[@torybruno7952]

Nicely researched, Scott

[@dcy665]

Fascinating, well done. Interesting data that allows all the variants to be recognized. Even by people who never connected with Thor missile systems with all these launches.

[@OrenTirosh]

Whoa! That atlas gimbaling footage is great

[@saltynarwhal]

Thanks for the vids sir!

[@kemble9900]

There's nothing more permanent than temporary

[@brothergrimaldus3836]

Temporary government program....

[@kenhelmers2603]

Wow, quite the history! Thanks Scott :)

[@MoonWeasel23]

Douglas is out here fielding a ballistic missile in 7 months while I can’t get a satellite finished in 2 years.

[@chrismorris6544]

Hello I work at Douglas and all the paper work and testing for everything takes time and a lot of wast unfortunately because each bird is a little different.And satellite are on the expensive side. Look at what happen with Delta III . Thank You I hope this help a little.

[@CantankerousDave]

“Nothing lasts longer than a ‘temporary fix’ that works well enough.”

[@camillovidani2586]

Your SEO game is impeccable, Scott

[@DonJoyce]

Wow, what a Thor-o discussion of this rocket family! Well done, Scott!

[@avejst]

Impressive video as always 👍 Thanks for sharing your expirence with all of us 👍 🙂

[@markbrown4442]

Greatvideo, thanks Scott

[@RWBHere]

Thanks for this brief history of a very famous and pioneering rocket. 🙂

[@BakuganBrawler211]

Let’s go! Can’t get enough of older rockets 🚀

[@w9gb]

I see that you used Ed Kyle’s well-documented history, as story reference !!

[@TomLeg]

Love your cheerful, optimistic shirt!

[@bernieshort6311]

Good grief Scott, that T shirt you are wearing seems alarming, please could you tell me what it’s about? Your wealth of knowledge is amazing, and you must spend hours researching for these video's. Thanks for this video, stay safe, kind regards from England UK.

[@parallelflow]

When I opened the video I got an ad about some Thor-themed beer, and considering the channel and the topic it couldn't have fit better lol

[@mnrobards]

Great Job !

[@drywinddotnet]

Great vid. I would disagree that the Starfish experiment disrupted communications "all around the world". But certainly disruption over a large area is correct. Thor's mythological "boomerang effect" is a good point! ;-)

[@dalerbsr.5061]

Thanks for the awesome content, this was a fun escape from the world news!

[@zippy5131]

When I was on 5131 here in the UK, RAF North Luffenham used to be a base of ops and training ground, and there hidden away at the far side of the Airfield were the Thor launch sites still with the concrete covers. That was around 2005 don't know if they are still there.

[@scottmanley]

The Thor launch sites were concrete pads with Meta sheds that would slide off to uncover the missile.

[@zippy5131]

@@scottmanley Was a few years ago and much whiskey has passed under the bridge, I can not entirley recollect the covers but they were Thor sites as the base was a V bomber base as well.

[@xbarryrs]

Is that a TLD shirt you are wearing? Thanks for all of your videos, love from Barry in Fife, Scotland!

[@RobSchofield]

Great history!

[@audiobrian1]

A great historical account here, to be sure, but what in the world is that t-shirt you’re wearing about, Scott??

[@jocax188723]

I’m convinced ‘Thor Delta’ was chosen because ‘Thor Four’ was too difficult to say quickly

[@HuntingTarg]

It may have been partly that (phonetic considerations), and partly NASA/USAF wanting to get away from iterating what was originally a US Army designation for a weapon launch vehicle.

[@marshalleubanks2454]

Good program!

[@ghostindamachine]

Incredible!

[@dwmzmm]

I have a flying scale model rocket of the Thor Agena - B, a clone of the famous kit from Estes Industries. Cool rocket & model, one of my favorites.

[@RTomassi]

Which is why it is generally frowned upon to use duct tape as a stop gap measure to fix stuff. It ends up being there way too long and might end up being the one thing upon which the ship relies for structural integrity...

[@jeromethiel4323]

You're thor!?! I'm so thor i can barely pith! ^-^

[@BigBossMan41]

Would love to see one of these rocket history videos about the titan aswell

[@LongPeter]

12:13 "Poppy, Heavy Ferret". Don't know how you managed to gloss over that one 😁

[@stay_at_home_astronaut]

Good video

[@blurglide]

Thor launching Corona was truly "Operationally responsive space". The curator of the museum that now sits where your video at the 5 minute mark was shot says they could get a tasking and have a Corona on orbit in less than two days.

[@alexhatfield2987]

Peerless, fascinating history and assessment of the Thor/Delta series, Scott, ma man.

[@aliteralpothole9205]

Thanks for making such great videos about space travel, Scott! Also, this has no relevance to your video, but what were your first opinions on the KSP “Scott Münley” mod?

[@rishiparitala88]

haha

[@declan9876]

that mod has been out for years now

[@aliteralpothole9205]

@@declan9876 I know

[@billhamill]

A great episode about my favorite rocket family - at least until Falcon 9. The Thor - Delta!

[@RedSkysAreOnFire]

well explains why we had a teacher at school who told us that the apollo rockets were designed to carry nuclear warheads, they obviously heard about the thor rockets put 2 and 2 together but got 5 instead of the right answer.

[@KTo288]

the reason we have NASA is that the US Army, US Navy and US Air Force each had their own ballistic missile programs and pet space launch programs. It would seem wasteful but if there was any country with resources to waste it would be the USA and it could be argued that the three competing programs accelerated the development of rocket technology in the US.

[@unitoonist]

Really cool 😎 🤙🏼

[@68f100ranger]

You had to have talked with Jay Prichard at the Vandenberg AFB museum. That's the only place you could have gotten some of this juicy footage.

[@RandomTheories]

Shoutout to Ed Kyle for all those blueprints 🙂

[@jwize386]

Whats that T Shirt about?

[@JoeyCarb]

The 50's and 60's were wild. I don't think there was a single thing that we didn't try to hit with a nuke.

[@slopehoke1277]

7:17 Ah, so these are the checkerboard-bottomed fuel tanks from Kerbal!

[@samuraidriver4x4]

When you mentioned the end of project Emily and the boosters being used for launching payloads I wonder what happened to the warheads? Was there a standard so they could fit those warheads on other boosters or did they "scrap" them? That also leads me to how do they actually produce these warheads?

[@leeterthanyou]

Love the Oregon trail shirt!

[@marekkozlovsky586]

or The Long Dark?

[@faceplants2]

I just came here to ask what that shirt was referencing.

[@StubbyPhillips]

"I'm so Thor I can hardly walk."

[@davewave1982]

Can you do a video discussing why rockets are so reliable now compared to how the first rockets always seemed to blow up on launch?

[@Br3ttM]

It's normal for new technologies to be unreliable until there has been enough time and testing to get them figured out, but hearing some of the specifics would be interesting. I know some of them got a few feet off the pad, then the engine failed, dropping them enough to burst.

[@joshuacheung6518]

Better simulations, more experience, better material science

[@olasek7972]

why - engineers learned from their mistakes

[@oldmandoinghighkicksonlyin1368]

SpaceX Starship still exploding. Something about pressurized explosive liquids being shot out of one end of a cylinder that is dangerous.

[@strayling1]

@@olasek7972 It would be interesting to learn what those mistakes were and how they were corrected.

[@nicholasmaude6906]

The two LR-101 vernier rocket motors in addition to providing fine trajectory control after BECO also provided roll-control the LR-79's operation.

[@ptolemythespacenerd]

I saw a Thor able at the uk national space centre and while back. There actually surprisingly big! 🚀

[@StrykerFox]

The only reason why I like Scott Manley is the way he says Space Shuttle. XD

[@osama810]

Babe wake up Scott manley uploaded a video

[@fffUUUUUU]

You'll end up sleeping on the sofa for that

[@oldmandoinghighkicksonlyin1368]

That's the problem with memes: they have a shelf life.

[@765kvline]

I've always had a lot of respect for the Thor IRBM. This video is evidence to the fact that it was a reliable and evolutionary vehicle of the first order.