Space Shuttle Discovery Launch Live Thread 2:38 EDT (Successful launch -- Discovery in Space)

07/04/06 | Kevin Davis

[KevinDavis]

Third time the charm?

[Phsstpok]

Most of the astronauts who landed on the Moon said it smelled like burnt gunpowder, cordite. Schmitt actually says that they should know what they're talking about since most them were military men.

This NASA article gives some excellent background on the lunar material and what it smelled like (and why it doesn't smell that way now). I think that what they were smelling was all of the materials in lunar dust "burning."  The astronauts were literally smelling the lunar dust burning when first exposed to oxygen. All of that volatile material is now gone, burned off, so the smell is gone.

They smelled active chemical processes attacking their samples before they could get them back to the lab. Makes for an interesting view of the value of the samples they returned.  Schmitt insists that we need to study the lunar materil "in situ" for that reason.

I'm with him.

[raygun]

Woo Hoo, eh?

[cripplecreek]

Aldrin is a bit of a hothead but he's pretty much right. He was bashing conspiracy theorists as being useless people who contribute nothing to society.

[raygun]

Huh. I did NOT know THAT.

[KevinDavis]

Well when you got a bunch of num nutts running around claiming that you never landed on the moon, I would too be a hothead..

[CedarDave]

That reply didn't make a lot of sense to me. Air doesn't accelerate anything, it's gravity that accelerates objects. However, air can decelerate objects and it may be that the lack of air means deceleration (due to friction, air resistance) is not as important as the object decelerates more slowly in thin air (i.e. retains its forward momentum longer).

[raygun]

Wow. The moon smells like burnt gun powder. So tonight when you blowing off fireworks, just casually remark: "God, I love the smell of the moon in the morning."

[raygun]

Acceleration is a vector with a scalar magnitude. When the air is sufficiently dense, the air decellerates whatever debris is shed. When the air is thinner, decellerations is insufficient whereby Delta-V is minimal with respect to acceleration of the launch vehicle.

[Brit1]

Thanks for the links Kevin. I just watched it with tears in my eyes and a pounding heart and.... on the Fourth of July...God Bless Them All

[markman46]

in other words the denser the air the more a small object would fly around, the thiner the air an object will just fall stright?

[ChadGore]

Torrents of the launch:

http://www.mininova.org/tor/358014 http://www.mininova.org/tor/358027

[maine-iac7]

We need ANOTHER Independence Day from MEXICO!!

This is about the Shuttle Launch - why don't you button it!

[ChadGore]

http://www.mininova.org/tor/358014
http://www.mininova.org/tor/358027

[raygun]

No, its like if you toss a bowling ball out your window while driving down the freeway into the windshield of the vehicle next to you while both of you are doing 100 MPH. Contrast that with if you in your car tooling along at 30 MPH and you did that to a car passing you at 100 MPH.

So when the launch vehicle gets much passed the 60 second mark, the debris will not decelerate sufficiently whereby Delta-v (between foam and launch vehicle) will be sufficiently small and the kinetic energy differential won't cause catastrophic failure of tiles.

Make sense?

[Brit1]

I watched that movie about a hundred times.If anybody comes into my house and starts to 'dump on the USA 'I make them watch it.....it always works.

My favourite line....'and that Gentlemen is how we do that'

[CedarDave]

I think the key is delta-v, as raygun said. A large delta-v, which will occur in dense air, could cause a loose object to damage the shuttle. A smaller delta-v would be less harmful.

[maine-iac7]

The water tower flushes the launch pad during liftoff for acoustic purposes. If not neutralized, the sonic vibrations would destroy the shuttle.

Talking with my son this morning - works on security/safety - Booster Rockets. We were discussing what I was seeing on TV and I thought he told me that the water tower sprays and fills water under the rockets to absorb power to keep the PAD from fracturing? Could be I didn't hear him right, he was explaining a lot of stuff...like the reason for the black band around the top of the left external fuel rocket, for ex

[kanawa]

I've got a good ISS pass tonight...max alt at 21:38:42
I don't suppose the shuttle will be near the ISS that soon, will it?

[raygun]

Aerodynamic drag = 1/2 * A * rho * V ^ 2 (where rho is density of air). Drag is a force and so it causes accleration. When a force's vector is opposite that of an objects motion, the object will decelerate. So the debris that may detach will suddenly become equal to that 30 MPH bowling ball, while the shuttle is accelerating passed at 2000 MPH. It makes no difference if the debris is as big as a postage stamp, it has the energy equivalent (there a square in kinetic energy equations) of a bowling ball.

[raygun]

That may be partly the case, but I believe the water's purpose is for cooling.