Picture a balloon.

It drifts peacefully upwards in the sky,  a gentle breeze helping it along its way. It floats higher and higher, until  it’s surrounded by fluffy white clouds.

A passing seagull gives it a  curious eye before moving on. And then, a rocket ignites,  shoots right through the balloon, and tears upwards into the atmosphere! That might sound outlandish.

But it’s actually a real thing  that’s been happening for 70 years! [♪ INTRO] Not to be confused with a raccoon, a rockoon is the combination of a rocket and a balloon. And it can actually be a fast, easy, and  cheap way to get rockets off the ground. The balloon carries the rocket past the lowest, thickest layers of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Then, when it’s high enough,  the rocket launches upwards, right through the balloon, to achieve a  higher altitude than it could by itself. This gets the rocket past  the Earth’s lower atmosphere without needing a specialized launch facility. Most heavy payloads are still going  to start off from a launchpad.

But for small payloads and light duty research  rockets, balloons are just the ticket. More than that, without balloons, we may never have been able  to get people to space safely. Back in the late 1940s, researchers  were interested in using balloons to launch sounding rockets: rockets  equipped with scientific instruments to collect information from the upper atmosphere.

These rockets helped them learn more about everything from weather to gravity to radiation. The first functioning rockoon used  a class of rocket called a

DEACON: a vertical sounding rocket that  was originally meant to carry about 20 kilograms of equipment, to  about 32 kilometers off the ground. In August of 1952, the DEACON rockoon  launched off the coast of Greenland, sent by a team of researchers  from the University of Iowa that included James A. Van Allen. With the help of the balloon, the DEACON rocket made it to an altitude of almost 64 kilometers.

That’s nearly double what it would have  been capable of reaching from the ground. Van Allen was looking for cosmic  radiation in the atmosphere. This radiation comes from all over the universe, mostly from far beyond our solar system.

And like most forms of  radiation, it could be dangerous for any living thing exposed to it. That meant, if we were ever going to  launch living things into outer space, we needed to learn how to protect them. Using DEACON rockoons, other  balloon-launched experiments, and the U.

S.’s earliest  satellites, Van Allen and his team measured the cosmic radiation  surrounding the Earth. He ultimately discovered two  “belts” of radiation that surround the Earth, named the  Van Allen belts in his honor. The Van Allen belts are two massive  areas of cosmic radiation that look sort of like a giant Venn  diagram, enveloping the Earth.

Our planet’s magnetic field actually  traps radiation in the upper atmosphere, keeping it away from the lower  atmosphere and the Earth’s surface. This protects us down on the ground  from being harmed by radiation. But it’s a problem for anyone  looking to get into space.

The discovery of the Van Allen  belts helped researchers figure out how to navigate through the spots  where the radiation was weakest, so astronauts could avoid as much of  the harmful radiation as possible. This knowledge protected the astronauts  of NASA’s Apollo 8 mission in 1968, the first crewed spaceship to  fly past the Van Allen belts. And it’s continued to protect  sensitive scientific equipment, living organisms, and  astronauts in the decades since.

Not bad for a project that started with  a tiny rocket hitched to a balloon! Rockoons were used in all sorts of  groundbreaking research throughout the 1950s. With the height of the Cold War,  the U.

S. and the Soviet Union competed fiercely to reach new  advances in space technology first. Rockoons helped fuel this research,  reaching higher and higher for new discoveries in cosmic radiation, the space between planets,  and other important data. In 1957, a set of rockoons  reached a mind-blowing height of almost six and a half thousand kilometers.

That’s one hundred times the altitude  that the first rockoon achieved. It pushes past what we call the “edge of space,” into the outermost layer of Earth’s  atmosphere: so thin it’s barely there at all. Rockoons had their downsides, though.

While a balloon could help gain altitude,  it also couldn’t really be steered. That’s why most rockoon launches  were conducted miles away from land. Far from being able to accidentally  fall on something important.

Or some one! In an effort to remedy this  issue, the next development in rocket launching technology was the “rockaire.” After all, if you can use a balloon to  launch a rocket, why not an aircraft? In the late 50s, researchers started  to experiment with this idea, but it never really took off.

Rockaires never achieved the same  exciting altitudes as rockoons, and were never used for major scientific research, so the idea was quickly abandoned. Of course, the heyday of the rockoon  did eventually come to an end. With the advent of sounding rockets that  could reach higher altitudes on their own, launching from a balloon  became an unnecessary step.

These days, NASA’s sounding rockets  can reach altitudes of 1300 kilometers. And for research that needs  a more zoomed-out view, satellites launched into Earth’s  orbit can give us the data we need. But rockoons still played an incredible  role in our early space research.

And they’re actually still used today! Many small, lightweight satellites  are launched with rockoons, since it’s much cheaper  than a whole rocket launch. Researchers are still working on  improving the design of rockoons to make them even better at what they do.

By refining the technology, scientists hope to make rockoons cheaper, faster, and more reliable. And it’s all thanks to that DEACON rocket,  launched into the Arctic air in 1952. So next time you picture a rocket launch, maybe the image won’t be a giant  spaceship taking off from Cape Canaveral.

Maybe it’ll be a tiny research  rocket, floating up into the clouds, attached to humankind’s original  flying machine: a humble balloon. Or if you prefer, you don’t  even have to picture it, because the DEACON rockoon is  our SciShow pin of the month! We thought a rocket that blasts into  space by way of a balloon would be a great thing to attach to your bag strap,  jacket, or pin board, so we made one.

We’re accepting preorders for this pin all month, and then once the month is up we’ll manufacture, ship, and get started on the next one. Which means right now is your  only chance to get this one! If you’re interested, check out  the link in the description below, and thanks for watching. [♪ OUTRO]