Saturn SA-3

Description

This was an uncrewed test flight of the Saturn 1 (SA-3) booster. The Saturn 1st stage carried upper stages filled with 23,000 gallons of water on a sub-orbital flight to a peak altitude of 167 km, 4 minutes 53 seconds after launch. At this point it was detonated by radio command, releasing the water into the ionosphere where it formed a massive cloud of ice particles several km in diameter. This cloud experiment, Project High Water II, was hoped to provide data on atmospheric physics but poor telemetry made the results questionable. The flight verification tests were all met. This was the third flight of the Saturn 1 booster and the first flight with a fully fueled first stage.