Juno I Orbital launch vehicle Explorer 1

These are 1/72 scale decals for the Juno I orbital launch vehicle — the rocket that carried Explorer 1 into orbit on 31 January 1958, making it the first successful American satellite and marking the United States' entry into the Space Age.

The Juno I was developed by a team led by the legendary Dr. Wernher von Braun at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) in Huntsville, Alabama, based on the PGM-11 Redstone ballistic missile with three upper stages of clustered solid-fuel rockets. The launch came at a moment of acute national urgency — the Soviet Union had stunned the world with Sputnik 1 in October 1957, and the United States' first attempt to respond with the Navy's Vanguard rocket had ended in an embarrassing explosion on the launch pad in December. The pressure on von Braun's Army team to succeed was immense, and on the night of January 31, 1958, Juno I delivered.

Explorer 1, the small cylindrical satellite carried atop Juno I, made an immediate and profound scientific contribution: its instruments, designed by physicist Dr. James Van Allen of the University of Iowa, detected the bands of radiation encircling the Earth that now bear his name — the Van Allen radiation belts — one of the first major discoveries of the Space Age. The famous photograph of von Braun, Van Allen, and JPL director William Pickering triumphantly hoisting a model of Explorer 1 above their heads at a Washington press conference became one of the iconic images of the era.

A landmark subject in the history of spaceflight — the rocket that answered Sputnik and launched America into space. Please allow some time for decal printing and shipping.