Apollo Spacecraft Status Report

[Homer J Simpson]

[rrinker]

 Whoa, 8:20 into the first video, with the deliberate destruction of the Little Joe to test the escape system, looks eerily like the footage from the Challenger explosion.

[Len]

Whoa, 8:20 into the first video, with the deliberate destruction of the Little Joe to test the escape system, looks eerily like the footage from the Challenger explosion.

Well, it wasn't supposed to go quite like that. The escape system was supposed to go off at high altitude, but the rocket started spinning right after launch, fell apart and triggered the abort early. By the time NASA made that film, it was "an unprogrammed roll", "a realistic launch emergency" and "not all mission objectives were attained".

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-003
(NASA’s official flight test report used to be online, but it has disappeared leaving only dead links and a snapshot of the cover page. Too embarrassing, I guess.)

[rdl]

I think it was in the Moon Machines documentary that Dale Myers described the Little Joe incident as a "successful failure".