Strypi is a two-stage US

sounding rocket A sounding rocket or rocketsonde, sometimes called a research rocket or a suborbital rocket, is an instrument-carrying rocket designed to take measurements and perform scientific experiments during its sub-orbital flight. The rockets are used to ...

. Its first stage consists of two Recruit, the second of one Castor. It is 31 inches (79 centimeters) in diameter, and has a maximum flight height of 124 miles (200 kilometers). It was originally designed and built in 1962 by teams from the Sandia National Laboratories in an around-the-clock program that was a part of a larger nuclear weapons testing program, undertaken prior to the imposition of the

Limited Test Ban Treaty The Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) is the abbreviated name of the 1963 Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space and Under Water, which prohibited all test detonations of nuclear weapons except for those conducted u ...

(LTBT) in October, 1963. It was designed to take a nuclear warhead into space for extra-atmospheric testing. Though it performed this function only once, in Test Checkmate of

Operation Fishbowl Operation Fishbowl was a series of high-altitude nuclear tests in 1962 that were carried out by the United States as a part of the larger ''Operation Dominic'' nuclear test program. Flight-test vehicles were designed and manufactured by Avco ...

, it became the "workhorse" of Sandia's rocket research program. The rocket's name came from the efforts of the Sandia teams, which had "taken the tiger by the tail". In 1968, a modified Strypi was used in Material Test Vehicle (MTV) booster tests. Although atmospheric nuclear testing was now banned, as a part of the

Test Readiness Program The Test Readiness Program was a United States Government program established in 1963 to maintain the necessary technologies and infrastructure for the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, should the treaty which prohibited such testing be abro ...

the U.S. Air Force continued to develop the means of testing, should the ban be lifted. American target missile. Family of re-entry vehicle test boosters and anti-missile targets using a Castor first stage with two recruit strap-ons, plus a range of upper stages.

Derivatives

The SPARK, also known as the Super Strypi, is a three-stage derivative of the Strypi powerful enough to place a 250 kg payload into

Sun-synchronous orbit A Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), also called a heliosynchronous orbit, is a nearly polar orbit around a planet, in which the satellite passes over any given point of the planet's surface at the same local mean solar time. More technically, it is ...

. The Super Strypi was first launched on 3 November 2015, although on that test the first stage failed soon after lift-off.

References

External links

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Sounding rockets of the United States Sandia National Laboratories {{rocket-stub