Posted on 06/27/2009 11:13:51 PM PDT by ErnstStavroBlofeld
A question on the letters page of the September 2002 issue of Fortean Times -- a British magazine which covers fringe science or "Fortean" subjects -- piqued my interest. Was it true that a manhole cover, accidentally blasted upwards at escape velocity during the American nuclear tests in the 1950s, was in fact the first manmade object in space, beating Sputnik 1 by a long way? Or was it just an urban myth?
The Internet is the natural home of the urban myth: the two could have been made for each other. The question therefore was: could it find room for the truth as well?
It's often thought necessary to give dire warnings about not trusting anything you see or read online. I would go further -- don't trust ANY source implicitly. The advice my history teacher gave me all those years ago seems to me to apply as well to the net as to anything else: When considering the validity of a source, ask yourself these questions: who created it, when (especially in relation to the events described), and why? With this in mind, and convinced that the story had to be nonsense, I nonetheless made some enquiries on the Internet, using Google as my base.
Here's what I found out.
"The first man-made object sent into space was a manhole cover which by now has travelled well past Pluto!" (SAAO). Sadly, the link promising the 'full story' is broken. Isn't it always the way?
(Excerpt) Read more at strangehorizons.com ...
Again, thanks. I will find it.
May not of?
If the nuclear blast didn't vaporize it, traveling at escape velocity through our thick atmosphere most certainly would.
It appears it appears impossible for it to retain much of its initial velocity while passing through the atmosphere. A ground launched hypersonic projectile has the same problem with maintaining its velocity that an incoming meteor has. According to the American Meteor Society Fireball and Meteor FAQ meteors weighing less than 8 tonnes retain none of their cosmic velocity when passing through the atmosphere, they simply end up as a falling rock. Only objects weighing many times this mass retain a significant fraction of their velocity
Yes, but it fun to chat about it.
Its fun to speculate about such things.
But I would also expect a hurtling disc would have rapidly begun to fly like a Frisbee, and that would ease its passage through the air. If not leaving Earth, it might have sailed out of the state, eventually falling into a body of water or a woods or somewhere else it would be regarded as just another piece of junk.
I take it you've never been to the Nevada desert.
Not if it came down on that person.
There are still a lot of bases out there. One comes in mind Nellis.
I would highly doubt the Pluto part. A nuclear blast would seem powerful enough to launch a tiny object into orbit, maybe a lot of them really.... interesting. But weren't these tests done in the desert? or out at sea?
You have the Groom lake facility and there are a fair amount of radiation devices out there too that need checking and calibrating
I agree with you. The Pluto part is impossible. These tests were done out in the DOE Nevada Site.
Plus you have a lot of seismic devices that are out there. Nevada is seismically active.
Are you suggesting that if the disk fell back into the desert, it would have shown up as a seismic vibration? Or that the seismic devices were manned so that the desert was filled with many observers?
And what if it Frisbee’d itself clear out of the desert?
It would be an interesting experiment to deliberately drop a manhole cover over the desert from the estimated height (less than 100 miles, the Space Shuttle goes much higher) and track what happens to it
I dropped a shot put from 1000’. After some searching I found a perfectly vertical “gopher hole”. I reached down all the way to my armpit and touched the shot put with my fingers at the bottom of the hole.
I know there are quite a few "Hold m'beer, watch this" moments ... this ain't one of them.
It's like trying to start a fire with water ... after all both hydrogen and oxygen are flammable and explosive, right?
You got it. This problem is among the much discussed flaws in Jules Verne's conception of a ballistic launch into space from a canon.
Of course, on entry to the atmosphere from space, the thin upper atmosphere is encountered first. Starting from the ground, it's problematical how an object can even be given an initial velocity on the order of escape velocity, and supposing that it could, it's initial encounter with the dense lower layer of the troposphere would be inconceivably violent.
An escape velocity in ground level atmosphere would mean instant plasma, no? Forget about higher layers. The film would have shown, not a dark object, but a fireball.
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