General > General Technical Chat
Starship/SuperHeavy orbital Flight Test LIVE
coppice:
--- Quote from: tautech on April 24, 2023, 07:30:57 am ---
--- Quote from: bookaboo on April 24, 2023, 06:42:10 am ---I recommend Scott Manley's channel, I hadn't noticed the chunks of debris at clast off, didn't know the ground water is an issue if they wanted to a chamber.
https://youtu.be/w8q24QLXixo
--- End quote ---
Every construction project has issues but you just deal with them instead of doing shortcuts. :horse:
Groundwater is NO excuse for not build the launch pad properly.....have they not heard of coffer dams and pumps ? :-//
--- End quote ---
Have they never heard of the Netherlands? Its nature is right there in the name.
jmelson:
--- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on April 21, 2023, 05:32:24 pm ---
Yes, lots of U.S. rockets blew up in the 1950s and early 1960s. Not all of these were NASA projects (they were military projects to develop ICBMs to carry nukes). The reason Saturn/Apollo was so successful was the project management/quality assurance/testing processes that NASA instituted starting with the manned programs. I think SpaceX uses a looser process, which results in more test failures. Sure, they get there in the end, but the development process seems more chaotic and out of control.
--- End quote ---
I worked as a work-study at NASA Wallops Island in 1972 in the 2-way radio and CCTV section. They had a "blooper reel" of video of stuff blowing up that just went On and ON! There were also war stories. One I remember was they launched a rocket and then zoomed the camera in on some object left on the pad. Somebody who knew the rocket yelled "That's the steering drive" as the rocket started to sway and then zoomed and looped all over the island. Some brave soul got up on the otpcal tracker and tried to guide the radars on the rocket visually so the command destruct antennas had a chance to point at it. It was just looping all over so fast that the antennas couldn't slew that fast. Finally, tne thing plunged into a sand dune and exploded.
Another story was a rocket that was supposed to arc over into an orbital path, but the timer that was to start the course change failed, and it just kept going up and up. Nobody knew exactly where it was going to come down. Due to Coriolus effects, they were pretty sure it would end up somewhere in the Atlantic, but not sure how far off the coast. They had to sit there with the radar until well after midnight before they could be sure it would be safe.
So, LOTS of stuff went boom back then.
Then, there were range safety oopses. Due to ocean swells, it was possble for small fishing boats to be missed when they swept the area. Some guys were out there in a 16 foot boat and had a Nike first stage drop out of the sky at a couple thousand miles per hour a few hundred feet from their boat. I think they were tossed dozens of feet in the air.
Jon
coppercone2:
--- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on April 21, 2023, 07:40:49 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on April 21, 2023, 06:40:09 pm ---
--- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on April 21, 2023, 06:01:41 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on April 21, 2023, 05:43:25 pm ---
--- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on April 21, 2023, 05:32:24 pm ---The Russians had a policy of only publicizing successful missions. Who knows how many failed and were swept under the rug? NASA (and SpaceX) do things completely out in the open, so the failures are there for all to see.
--- End quote ---
In the 60s NASA was only as open as it was pushed to be (i.e. not very open except for actual launches, which didn't occur deep in deserted areas, like Kazakhstan, so they were hard to hide), and things seemed to go quite well. Now its almost as open as SpaceX and its performance looks quite poor. Coincidence? I doubt it. Look under the surface of most development work and it looks pretty messy.
--- End quote ---
Please explain what you mean by your assertion that NASA was only as open as they had to be in the 1960s. I've extensively studied the history of the space program in the 1960s, including reviewing primary sources, and I don't see any trend to secrecy at all. Yes, the military had their own parallel space programs (such as the Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory and the various spy satellite programs), but these weren't connected with NASA, except in very peripheral ways. NASA published almost everything relating to their programs and it was available in book form from the very beginning (I've got copies of a lot of it).
As to messy, yes, some of it may have seemed messy, and that's understandable because a lot of what they were doing had never been done before. As an example, I suggest people read a series of memos written by Howard "Bill" Tindall known as Tindallgrams -- they give a good flavor for the types of internal discussions that took place at NASA in the 1960s.
https://history.nasa.gov/alsj/alsj-Tindallgrams.html
--- End quote ---
Take an example. Everyone knows Neil Armstrong, and pilot David Scott nearly died on Gemini 8, when things got out of hand in a docking manoeuvre with an Agena craft, and had to return immediately to Earth. In 1966 you wouldn't have been aware that anything serious had taken place. I was one of those watching the news about anything to do with space travel at that time.
--- End quote ---
I've watched the news coverage of all NASA flights starting with Gemini III in 1965 and I distinctly remember the coverage of Gemini VIII and the stuck thruster issue. It received prominent coverage on the US TV networks.
What the news shows is up to them, not NASA. If the news didn't show the docking and the stuck thruster problem, that's not NASA's fault.
NASA themselves published a documentary on the flight of Gemini VIII in 1966 and they certainly didn't hide anything. In fact, this video is on YouTube and you can see for yourself:
--- End quote ---
I appreciate this, its really easy to run into NASA related 'disinformation' related to NASA/MIC/GOVERNMENT collusion/conspiracy that are used to credit some whacky theories and discredit the organization. Alot of people won't bother to check what NASA actually said. People seem to imply that US and the USSR space programs behaved similarly, but it seems to be far from the truth.
I think publishing the video only 1 year after the event, with the limitations of technology (difficulty in editing, distributing, etc film) means that it was incredibly diligent about being transparent. These are the same people that sent the golden record out after all. They seemed hopeful. If NASA was as paranoid as some conspiracists/propagandaists claim, the golden record would never ever be produced, its practically a blue print on the earth.
coppice:
--- Quote from: jmelson on April 26, 2023, 01:19:18 am ---
--- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on April 21, 2023, 05:32:24 pm ---
Yes, lots of U.S. rockets blew up in the 1950s and early 1960s. Not all of these were NASA projects (they were military projects to develop ICBMs to carry nukes). The reason Saturn/Apollo was so successful was the project management/quality assurance/testing processes that NASA instituted starting with the manned programs. I think SpaceX uses a looser process, which results in more test failures. Sure, they get there in the end, but the development process seems more chaotic and out of control.
--- End quote ---
I worked as a work-study at NASA Wallops Island in 1972 in the 2-way radio and CCTV section. They had a "blooper reel" of video of stuff blowing up that just went On and ON! There were also war stories. One I remember was they launched a rocket and then zoomed the camera in on some object left on the pad. Somebody who knew the rocket yelled "That's the steering drive" as the rocket started to sway and then zoomed and looped all over the island. Some brave soul got up on the otpcal tracker and tried to guide the radars on the rocket visually so the command destruct antennas had a chance to point at it. It was just looping all over so fast that the antennas couldn't slew that fast. Finally, tne thing plunged into a sand dune and exploded.
Another story was a rocket that was supposed to arc over into an orbital path, but the timer that was to start the course change failed, and it just kept going up and up. Nobody knew exactly where it was going to come down. Due to Coriolus effects, they were pretty sure it would end up somewhere in the Atlantic, but not sure how far off the coast. They had to sit there with the radar until well after midnight before they could be sure it would be safe.
So, LOTS of stuff went boom back then.
Then, there were range safety oopses. Due to ocean swells, it was possble for small fishing boats to be missed when they swept the area. Some guys were out there in a 16 foot boat and had a Nike first stage drop out of the sky at a couple thousand miles per hour a few hundred feet from their boat. I think they were tossed dozens of feet in the air.
Jon
--- End quote ---
There were a series of training videos made in the 70s by the DoD, and used across NATO countries, to stress the importance of taking EMI/EMC issues seriously in defence systems, and giving guidance about how to proceed. The first video was basically to scare you into taking things seriously, by showing a series of calamities caused by various interference issues. Quite a few of those were large rockets, performing some spectacular inappropriate manoeuvres. Thankfully most of them did receive and correctly process the self-destruct command.
james_s:
How much explosive charge does a typical large rocket carry and what's left after it destructs? There are a lot of big, heavy metal components and it seems unlikely that they all just vaporize. The self destruct gets rid of all the fuel and oxidizer but there must be quite a few big heavy chunks raining down.
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