May 2, 1963

1963Ronald Barnes, 3rd Baron Gorell, English cricketer, peer, politician, poet, author and newspaper editor (born 1884)^[†]

Ronald Gorell Barnes, 3rd Baron Gorell, was a British peer, Liberal politician, poet, author and newspaper editor.

1963Berthold Seliger launches a rocket with three stages and a maximum flight altitude of more than 100 kilometres (62 mi) near Cuxhaven. It is the only sounding rocket developed in Germany.^[†]

The Berthold Seliger Forschungs- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft mbH (BSFEGmbH) was a company founded by West German rocket technical designer Berthold Seliger in 1961. Seliger was a former assistant theoretician professor Dr. Eugen Sänger. The company developed and built prototypes of sounding rockets and launched them near Cuxhaven. The BSFEGmbH cooperated strongly with the Hermann-Oberth-Gesellschaft, of which Berthold Seliger was a member. The first rocket developed by the BSFEGmbH was an improved version of the Kumulus, which was first launched on 19 November 1962 and reached a height of 50 kilometres. On 7 February 1963 the BSFEGmbH launched a two-stage rocket with a maximum height of 80 kilometres and, on 2 May 1963, they launched a three-stage rocket with a maximum flight height of more than 100 kilometres. The latter rocket may have attained the highest flight altitude of all rockets built in post-war Germany. The signals from all these rockets were also received at the observatory in Bochum. After May 1963 the BSFEGmbH worked on the improvement of the steering system of their rockets and thought also on military usable rockets.