Posted on 01/24/2013 5:34:29 PM PST by Islander7
A vintage rocket engine built to blast the first U.S. lunar mission into Earth's orbit more than 40 years ago is again rumbling across the Southern landscape.
The engine, known to NASA engineers as No. F-6049, was supposed to help propel Apollo 11 into orbit in 1969, when NASA sent Neil Armstrong and two other astronauts to the moon for the first time.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I thought all of them had been destroyed per Nixon’s order.
When you consider that everything else in life has gotten better and more efficient, it just seems out of place to be still using technology that is 60 years old and so inefficient.
Me too. I’ve been reading a book by the late David M. Potter: The Impending Crises: 1848-1861. On page 12 (pb edition) he writes of those early Americans: “Pitting their muscle against the elements, these men were independent, agressively individualistic, and fiercely hostile to external controls. Prizing the opportunity to become unequal in personal achievement and hating the inequality of pretention to status, they cherished an unsleeping distrust of public authority and glorified the virtues of simplicity, frugality, liberty and self-reliance.” Alas, that America is gone. I love that “opportunity to become unequal.” This concept is more attuned to reality. Obama is committed to equality of outcome which is as anti-American as you can get. He and the Dems can’t abide the concept laid down by Samuel Johnson: “How small of all that human hearts endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” Just so. Within limits we are the architects of our own success or failure. But this is no longer the opinion of the majority; hence Obama, the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people.
This is what is done now. Launch sites tend to be near the equator where rotational speed is greatest (about 1,000 miles per hour at the equator) and launches are toward the east to take advantage of the rotation of the Earth.
L.P.
At least there has been some progress. :)
When I was a teenager I remember hearing the Saturn V engine tests from my hometown 50 miles from Huntsville. Those things shook the ground good if you were close. I had the good fortune of seeing a shuttle main engine live test firing in Huntsville a few years back. There is no way to adequately describe that experience with words. I was shell shocked when it was over.
They must have put this one together from various museums.
“I’m just wondering if there’s a way to use Earth’s rotation to help leave orbit, without such large booster rockets?”
They do that now by launching from florida and launching to the east.
“A marvel of good ol’ American can do.”
It was Werner Von Braun, who was probably an ex Nazi.
bflr
My uncle said the noise from a Saturn V launch was much louder than that of the Shuttle.
Great video rottndog, many thanks. Re: the hold-down clamps at 1:35. Norman Mailer of all people writes of this in his Of A Fire On The Moon, and in prose approaching the sublime:
But for the moment the spaceship does not move. Four giant hold-down arms large as flying buttresses hold to a ring at the base of Saturn v while the thrust of the motors builds up in the nine seconds, reaches a power in thrust equal to the weight of the rocket. Does the rocket weigh six million, four hundred and eighty-four thousand pounds? Now the thrust goes up, the flames pour out, now the thrust is four million, five million, six million pounds, an extra million pounds of thrust each instant as those thousands of gallons of fuel rush every second to the motors, now it balances at six million, four hundred thousand and eighty- four thousand, two hundred and eighty pounds. The bulk of Apollo-Saturn is in balance on the pad. Come, you could now levitate it with a finger, but for the hold-down arms. Now in the next second and the next, the thrust is up to full launch, to seven and a half million pounds, more, more than one million pounds of surplus force is now ready to push upward. And still the rocket is restrained. The hold-down arms, large as butresses will retain the ship for two more seconds before lift-off. The last check-outs race through the automatic sequence and GO comes back, and the hold-down arms - what engineering in those giants! - pull back, and Apollo-Saturn rises inch by inch in those first seconds, pulling tapered pins through dies to slow the instant of the release. Inch by inch, then foot by foot, slowly, story by story, swing-arm by swing-arm, the swing-arms pulling back in the last five seconds, the last two seconds, umbilicals snapping back, slowly Apollo-Saturn climbs up the length of the Mobile Launcher, the flame of apocalypse no more than the sparks of its chariot, and spectators cry, “Go, baby, go.”
Incidentally, those turbines feeding each F-1 are rated at fifty-five thousand horsepower and are as large as a refrigerator. Each could empty a swimming pool of 30,000 gallons of water in less than nine seconds. I just marvel at that rocket and the engineers who designed it.
According to this each F-1 rocket engine had more power than the three main engines of the Shuttle combined!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-1_(rocket_engine)
Rice University Carbon Nanotube Breakthrough Has Implications for Space Applications
Good answer. I saw a video that gave me a better outlook. The Sun is traveling through space at 486,000 MPH. The earth is doing the same thing while rotating around the sun.
So if I was able to fly out into outer space and “stop”, would everything continue to move on without me or would I be sucked up into the system and flow along?
snip
In 1929, Goddard launched the first scientific payload (a barometer and a camera) aboard a rocket flight.
Meanwhile in Germany, the German Rocket Society was formed in 1927, and the German Army began a rocket program in 1931. In the USA, Goddard received almost no support from the US government, which did not yet understand the importance of rocketry. The German government paid much more attention to Goddard's work than the US government did.
Thanks for posting.
“I saw a video that gave me a better outlook”
I should explain that statement. I knew we were moving through space but the full picture did not hit me until I saw a cool video. As soon as I saw it I thought, gee it would be easy to be left alone if you don’t move at the 486,000 MPH everything else is moving at
Space is more amazing then we can possibly imagine
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.