Deacon is the designation of an American sounding rocket

Sounding rocket

A sounding rocket, sometimes called a research rocket, is an instrument-carrying rocket designed to take measurements and perform scientific experiments during its sub-orbital flight. The origin of the term comes from nautical vocabulary, where to sound is to throw a weighted line from a ship into...

. The Deacon was launched 90 times from 1947 to 1957 from Wallops Island. The Deacon has a maximum flight height of 20 kilometers and a pay load ability of 17 kilograms. The takeoff thrust

Thrust

Thrust is a reaction force described quantitatively by Newton's second and third laws. When a system expels or accelerates mass in one direction the accelerated mass will cause a force of equal magnitude but opposite direction on that system....

 of the Deacon amounts to 27 kN, the takeoff weight

Weight

In science and engineering, the weight of an object is the force on the object due to gravity. Its magnitude , often denoted by an italic letter W, is the product of the mass m of the object and the magnitude of the local gravitational acceleration g; thus:...

 93 kg, the diameter 0.16 m and the length 3.28 m.

Triple Deacon

The Triple Deacon was a single stage member of the Deacon family that used three Deacon booster motors. Five launches from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility

Wallops Flight Facility

Wallops Flight Facility , located on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, is operated by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, primarily as a rocket launch site to support science and exploration missions for NASA and other U.S. government agencies...

occurred in 1953 - 1954.