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 ...
OK, who wants to be the proposer of this to the Discover Channel’s Mythbuster Show? I wonder what kind of clearance and site would be needed for this one? Guarantee that the police explosives range ain’t going to cut this mustard!
BTW as I have had lots of strange love over the years... could sonof possibly be mine????
The cover was on top of an air shaft and was propelled by the compressed air from the blast.
If a manhole cover falls in the desert, does it make a sound?
Might have well been blasted into space, you won't find any of these in the possession of GOP members of Congress.
Even so, the plate's maximum velocity would have been at "launch" -- in the densest part of the atmosphere. IOW, it would have been a "meteor in reverse", and would have vaporized before it exited the atmosphere...
The chance that this 'disc' would maintain a completely 'flat', or 'face on' trajectory, is zero.
Even today there's a whole lotta nothing out there.
You do know they didn’t fire this manhole cover into space, just yesterday?
How many of those seismic stations were in place the day this nuclear cannon was fired?
Extrapolation ... isn't that what got us the current Global Warming Theory???
I think that was more "Invention" than extrapolation. In any event the physics of extrapolating velocity from known data points is very exact in this case.
I just KNEW this would be one of your posts! I was wrong.
Can we arranged Maury Povitch do DNA test on you Bender and him
But:
H. Julian Allen and A. J. Eggers, Jr. of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) made the counterintuitive discovery in 1951 that a blunt shape (high drag) made the most effective heat shield. From simple engineering principles, Allen and Eggers showed that the heat load experienced by an entry vehicle was inversely proportional to the drag coefficient, i.e. the greater the drag, the less the heat load. Through making the reentry vehicle blunt, air can't "get out of the way" quickly enough, and acts as an air cushion to push the shock wave and heated shock layer forward (away from the vehicle). Since most of the hot gases are no longer in direct contact with the vehicle, the heat energy would stay in the shocked gas and simply move around the vehicle to later dissipate into the atmosphere.
An initial velocity of 67,000 m/s generates about the same temperature in Kelvin, 67,000K. But this is a peak shock layer temperature. That's on the leading side. If the object is tumbling or not, then the alee side is subjected to very low pressures which effectively freeze chemical reactions. Thus cooling the object...
Given the initial impact from the nuclear soup emerging from the shaft, the disk would probably be deformed into a conical/dome shape...
In 1 or 2 seconds there wouldn't be enough time for anything to happen, other than slamming into Leary's orbiting head. But then again it wasn't up there at the time - lol
Interesting stuff to think about.
OK. Exactly how fast was it going, and how far did it go?
Initial speed was ~ 25,000 mph, and it is still flying through space. It did not go into orbit, it left the Earth's gravitational field.
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.