PROJECT RAND SATELLITE VEHICLE FOLLOW-ON Reports

At the end of World War II, visionary military officers saw that the future of United States military superiority was scientific research.  General Henry "Hap" Arnold and others in the Army Air Forces started a project under contract with the Douglas Aircraft Company.  This effort resulted in the first real, and perhaps most influential "Think Tank," Project RAND (Research ANd Development) made up of top-level scientists and engineers.  Although a wide range of subjects were planned to be addressed, the very first research project was to study the possibility and usefulness of a man-made artificial Earth satellite.  This first paper was Project RAND Special Memorandum SM-11827, Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship,¹ which was accomplished in an astonishingly short time and issued May 1946.

Of course the first study could not address all aspects of an Earth satellite program in detail, so work on this project continued and twelve follow-on research reports were issued by Project RAND to the Army Air Forces on February 1, 1947.  Governmentattic.org is pleased to be able to make available all twelve of these historic reports here.

Many RAND reports have been cited as source material by authors over the years and many of the thousands of RAND reports are available.  However many early RAND reports are definitely not readily available.  RAND itself will not provide many of these early reports and, when asked, say the reports are the property of "the client" and refer one to "the military."  To be fair, RAND does make many of its reports available.  All of the reports made available here were difficult to locate and obtain.  One was found and copied at a west coast university library, two were obtained through interlibrary loan from widely separated libraries and, after considerable research, the remaining nine reports were located at the US Air Force Air University library, Maxwell Air Force Base, AL.  The researchers were amazed to discover eight of these 62-plus year old reports were still classified (at the Confidential level, having been downgraded in the intervening decades from their original Secret classification).  A Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) request filed with the Air Force in March 2009 finally resulted in the release of the final nine reports June 16, 2010.

These reports represent the thinking of some of the country's top scientists on many aspects of the daunting project of building an artificial Earth satellite and launching it into orbit.  Today we take satellites for granted as part of our everyday lives, but in 1947 a great deal of the information and technology needed to build and orbit satellites was uncharted territory.  How close to what we know and do today did the scientists of 1946-47 come?  These reports reveal answers to that and many other questions.

Access the files through the following links.  The files are made available individually in PDF files and all files in a single ZIP archive.

1. The first Project RAND Special Memorandum is available for purchase or free download from the RAND web site here

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