German A4 (rocket), long article but rather interesting
08-31-2000, 05:47 AM
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German A4 (rocket), long article but rather interesting
Below is a excerpt from a longer article on the history of rocketry. Instead of taking out just the A4 parts I took the article from the first mention of the A4 on....I figure there are some others at work just as bored as myself : ) Think of it as your history lesson for today....
....a story of how young von Braun's interest in rocketry almost got him labeled as a juvenile delinquent. At the age of 13, von Braun exhibited an interest in explosives and fireworks. His father could not understand his son's consuming interest in so dangerous a hobby. He feared his son would become safecracker. One day the young teenager obtained six skyrockets, strapped them to a toy red wagon and set them off. Streaming flames and a long trail of smoke, the wagon roared five blocks into the center of the von Braun family's hometown, where the rockets finally exploded.
As the smoke cleared, the toy wagon emerged as a charred wreck. Young von Braun emerged in the firm grasp of a policeman. Despite being severely reprimanded by his father, the youngster's interest would not be denied. By the age of 22 he had earned his doctorate in physics. Two years later he was directing Germany's military rocket development program.
Von Braun and his colleagues produced a number of experimental designs, the most famous of which was the A-4 rocket, which has gained distinction in history under another name -- the vengeance weapon number two -- V-2 for short. The V-2 was the first successful, long range ballistic missile, and von Braun is credited as its principal developer.
As World War II drew to a close, von Braun led his contingent of several hundred rocket scientists and engineers -- all marked for death by the ***** to prevent their capture by the Allies -- into American lines.
In 1946, von Braun and his team arrived at White Sands, N.M., where, for the first time, von Braun learned of work done by the American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard.
Goddard's interest in rockets began in 1898 when, as a 16-year-old, he read the latest publication of that early science fiction writer, English novelist H.G. Wells. The book which so excited Goddard was later made into a 1938 radio program that nearly panicked our entire nation when it was broadcast. Orson Well's too realistic rendition of the "War of the Worlds" still causes many to shudder.
As the 20th Century began, Wilbur and Orville Wright were preparing to become the first men to fly. Goddard, however, was already designing rockets to probe the upper atmosphere and delve into space. Half a world away -- and unknown to Goddard -- a Russian school teacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, was thinking along much the same lines. Both came to the conclusion independently that, if a rocket was going to do the things they dreamed of, it would have to be powered by liquid fuels. Solid fuels of the time simply didn't have sufficient power. Tsiolkovsky lacked Goddard's practicality. While Tsiolkovsky worked out many principles of astronautics and designed suitable rockets, he never built any. By contrast, Goddard was a technical man. He could and did build rockets. By the time he died in 1945, Goddard held 214 patents in rocketry -- patents which still produce royalties for his estate.
Goddard began his experiments in rocketry while studying for his doctorate at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
He first attracted attention in 1919 when he published a paper titled, "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes." In his paper he outlined his ideas on rocketry and suggested, none too seriously, that a demonstration rocket should be flown to the Moon.
The general public ignored the scientific merit of the paper -- latching instead onto Goddard's Moon rocket proposal. At the time, such an endeavor was absurd and most dismissed Goddard as a "crank."
The experience taught Goddard a hard lesson -- one which caused him to shy away from future opportunities to publicize his work. Publicity was far from Goddard's mind on the morning of March 16, 1926. On that day, barely a year after Wernher von Braun's rocket wagon fiasco, Goddard launched a liquid-powered rocket he had designed and built from a snow-covered field at his Aunt Effie Goddard's farm in Auburn, Mass. The rocket flew only 46 meters (152 feet) -- about the same distance as the Wright Brothers' first manned flight -- but it did fly! It was the first flight of a liquid-fueled rocket in history.
When Goddard was later approached by the American Interplanetary Society in 1930 to publicize his work, Goddard refused. The society, rebuffed and learning that no one in the United States aside from Goddard was working with rockets, turned its attention to rocket research under way in Europe, where rocketry was beginning to develop a following.
In the spring of 1931, two founder-members of the American society, husband and wife Edward and Lee Pendray, travelled on vacation to Germany where they made contact with the German Rocket Society, which had been formed in 1927. The visiting Americans were given a preview of the future when a member of the German Rocket Society -- Prof. ***** Ley -- took the pair to the Germans' rocket flying test ground in the suburbs of Berlin.
Returning home, the Pendrays filed an enthusiastic report of their visit, prompting the American society to build its first rocket. The attempted test flight in November 1932 ended with the American design firmly on the ground. It's unfortunate the Pendrays didn't meet another future rocketry hall-of-famer who also was a member of the German society. Rumanian-born Hermann Oberth wrote, in 1923, a highly prophetic book: "The Rocket into Interplanetary Space." The book enthralled many with dreams of space flight, including that precocious German teenager, Wernher von Braun, who read the book in 1925. Five years later, von Braun had joined Oberth and was assisting with rocket experiments.
By 1932, the German Army was beginning to show an interest in the German Rocket Society's efforts, and in July of that year, a "Mirak" rocket was launched as a demonstration for the head of the newly created German Army rocket research group, Captain (later Major General) Walter Dornberger.
Mirak didn't impress Dornberger.
Von Braun did.
Three months after the demonstration flight, von Braun was engaged to work on liquid propelled rockets for the Army. Most of the German Rocket Society followed von Braun into national service and the society disbanded.
By December 1934, von Braun scored his first successes with an A2 rocket powered by ethanol and liquid oxygen. Two years later, as plans for the follow-on A3 rocket were being finalized, initial planning began for the A4 rocket -- a rocket that was to be, in Dornberger's words, a practical weapon, not a research tool. As noted earlier, most know the A4 by another name -- the V-2.
The rocket researchers quickly outgrew their facilities at Kummersdorf on the outskirts of Berlin and, in 1936, operations were transferred to a remote island on Germany's Baltic coast -- Peenemuende.
Between 1937 and 1941, von Braun's group launched some 70 A3 and A5 rockets, each testing components for use in the proposed A4 rocket.
The first A4 rocket flew in March 1942. The rocket barely cleared some low clouds before crashing into the sea a half mile from the launch site.
The second launch in August 1942 saw the A4 rise to an altitude of 11 kilometers (7 miles) before exploding.
The third try was the charm. On October 3, 1942, another A4 roared aloft from Peenemuende, followed its programmed trajectory perfectly, and landed on target 193 kilometers (120 miles) away. This launch can fairly be said to mark the beginning of the space age. The A4, the first successful ballistic rocket, is the ancestor of practically every rocket flown in the world today.
Production of the A4 began in 1943 and the first A4s, now renamed V2s, were launched against London in September 1944.
The V-2 offensive came too late to affect the course of the war. By April 1945, the German Army was in full retreat everywhere and Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin.
At an inn near Oberjoch, the Haus Ingeburg, von Braun and over 100 of his rocket experts waited for the end. The entire team had been ordered executed by Hitler to prevent their capture. Wernher von Braun's brother, Magnus, however, managed to contact nearby American forces before Hitler's SS henchmen could reach the rocket team. On May 2, the same day Berlin fell to the Soviet Army, von Braun and his rocket team entered American lines and safety.
With the fighting over, von Braun and his team were heavily interrogated and jealously protected from Russian agents. V2s and V2 components were assembled. German rocket technicians were rounded up. In June, General Eisenhower sanctioned the final series of V2 launches in Europe. Watching each of the three V2s which rose from a launch site at Cuxhaven was a Russian Army colonel, Sergei Korolev. Ten years later, Korolev would be hailed as the Soviet Union's chief designer of spacecraft and the individual responsible for building the Vostok, Voshkod and Soyuz spacecraft which, since 1961, have carried all Soviet cosmonauts into orbit.
Few members of von Braun's team participated in the Cuxhaven launches. Most had already begun setting up shop at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas. Piled up in the desert near Las Cruces, New Mexico, were enough parts to build 100 V2s. Von Braun and his team soon moved to nearby White Sands Proving Ground where work began assembling and launching V2s. By February 1946, von Braun's entire Peenemuende team had been reunited at White Sands and, on April 16, the first V2 was launched in the United States. The U.S. space program was under way!
Up to 1952, 64 V2s were launched at White Sands. Instruments, not explosives, packed the missiles' nosecones. A V2 variant saw the missile become the first stage of a two stage rocket named Bumper. The top half was a WAC Corporal rocket. The need for more room to fire the rockets quickly became evident and, in 1949, the Joint Long Range Proving Ground was established at remote, deserted Cape Canaveral, Fla. On July 24, 1950, a two-stage Bumper rocket became the first of hundreds to be launched from "the Cape."
The transfer of launch operations to the Cape coincided with the transfer of the Army's missile program from White Sands to a post just outside a north Alabama cotton town called Huntsville. Von Braun and his team arrived in April 1950. It was to remain his home for the next 20 years, a period in which the city's population increased ten fold.
The von Braun team worked to develop what was essentially a super-V2 rocket, named for the U.S. Army arsenal where it was being designed -- the Redstone.
In 1956, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency was established at Redstone Arsenal under von Braun's leadership to develop the Jupiter intermediate range ballistic missile. A version of the Redstone rocket, known as the Jupiter C, was used on January 31, 1958, to launch America's first satellite, Explorer I. Three years later, Mercury Redstones launched Alan Shepard and Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom on suborbital space flights, paving the way for John Glenn's first orbital flight.
In 1958, NASA was established, and, two years later, von Braun, his team, and the entire Army Ballistic Missile Agency were transferred to NASA to become the nucleus of the agency's space program.
The Army Missile Command, which owns Redstone Arsenal, continued its vital national defense mission after the transfer of ABMA to NASA, chalking up a remarkable number of successful programs to augment America's landpower. MICOM's successes include the Pershing II, the NIKE weapons systems, the HAWK system, Improved HAWK, Corporal, Sergeant, Lance and Chaparral, to name a few.
Pursuing a separate course -- that of developing rockets for space exploration -- the Marshall Space Flight Center's past quarter century has been a time of superlatives.
In 1961, almost as Alan Shepard was drying off from his landing in the Atlantic following his riding a Marshall-designed Redstone rocket on a sub-orbital flight which made him the first American in space, President Kennedy committed this nation to being first on the Moon. NASA's Marshall Center was charged with developing the family of giant rockets which would take us there.
The Saturn rockets developed at Marshall to support the Apollo program and to honor President Kennedy's pledge were, at the time, the most powerful space launch vehicles yet to have been invented.
Engineers, scientists, contractors, and other support personnel built well. On July 20, 1969, a transmission from the Moon's Sea of Tranquility reported: "The Eagle has landed."
Marshall's Saturn rockets first took us around the Moon, then to its cratered surface. Marshall-developed lunar excursion vehicles -- the ungainly Moon Buggies -- carried astronauts on far-ranging excursions in pursuit of samples of lunar soil and rock.
Closer to home, the team at Marshall developed America's first space station -- Skylab. Built to replace the upper stage of a Saturn V moon rocket, the Skylab module was successfully placed in orbit early on May 14, 1973.
Placing Skylab in orbit marked a major transition in the story of rocketry. Up until Skylab, the rocket had been the star -- the featured attraction. The focus had been on the up and down -- launch and recovery. Skylab, in essence stole the show. For the first time, space became a place in which to live and work. Flying aboard a rocket was about the Earthside equivalent of driving the family car to work. Just as having to drive to work is only incidental to work itself -- flying aboard a rocket became secondary to the work done once Skylab had been reached. The rocket, simply stated, became a means to an end -- the end in this case being the opportunity to learn to live and work in space.
A rash of malfunctions plagued Skylab's early days -- problems which tested the resourcefulness of the entire NASA team. The problems were overcome, however, and Skylab went on to become one of Marshall's proudest achievements.
A Marshall-developed Saturn I-B also carried aloft America's half of the first joint U.S.-Soviet space endeavor, the Apollo-Soyuz project.
After Apollo, the team at Marshall tackled designing a revolutionary national space transportation system, which came to be known simply as "The Space Shuttle."
It is anything but simple!
The space shuttle main engines are among the most powerful, most sophisticated devices ever invented. They represent a quantum leap in technology advancement over the engines which powered the Saturn V. Each of the three main engines in tail of the shuttle can provide almost a half-million pounds of thrust, a thrust equal to that produced by all eight of the Saturn I's first stage engines. Unlike most previous rocket engines, which were designed to be used only once -- and then for only a few minutes -- the space shuttle's main engines are designed to be used again and again, for up to 7.5 hours. The thrust to weight ratio for these engines is the best in the world -- each engine weighs less than 7,000 pounds but puts out the power equivalent of seven Hoover Dams!
Twenty-four successful flights of the space shuttle lulled America into a sense of complacency. Shuttle launches became routine -- a ho-hum event which had to scramble for an inch or two on page 2.
Then came the Challenger disaster....
The time since the loss of Challenger has been the busiest in the history of Marshall Space Flight Center. Teams of experts have been organized to find and fix the problems which led to the accident. Investigation quickly focused on a defective joint in the space shuttle's solid rocket motors. Rocket propulsion experts devised a number of modifications to the solid rocket motor design to remedy the fault.
A vigorous test program was undertaken to show that the problems had been solved.
The disaster-enforced hiatus in shuttle operations gave Marshall -- and other NASA installations -- an opportunity to address other shuttle-related concerns. Major steps were taken to enhance the reliability and safety of the turbine blades and turbo pumps in the shuttle's main engines. An escape system was created for the shuttle crew. Improvements were made to the orbiter's landing gear and brakes.
When America returned to manned spaceflight in 1988, it did so in a space vehicle which was vastly safer and more capable.
NASA also is examining using expendable launch vehicles on missions which do not require the shuttle's unique capabilities, and is looking into development of a new generation of heavy lift launch vehicles.
These will become the next chapter in the story of rocketry -- a story whose first chapters were written more than 2,400 years ago.
No one can say where our path will lead or when -- hopefully never -- the last chapter in this history will be written.
One extra factoid for those of you who made it this far...Goddard was mocked for his 1919 assertion of sending a rocket to the moon. The paper that had lambasted him in 1919 printed a retraction after the 1969 landing on the moon....A little bit of justice<p>'01 1.8T QMSPXB + ESP
....a story of how young von Braun's interest in rocketry almost got him labeled as a juvenile delinquent. At the age of 13, von Braun exhibited an interest in explosives and fireworks. His father could not understand his son's consuming interest in so dangerous a hobby. He feared his son would become safecracker. One day the young teenager obtained six skyrockets, strapped them to a toy red wagon and set them off. Streaming flames and a long trail of smoke, the wagon roared five blocks into the center of the von Braun family's hometown, where the rockets finally exploded.
As the smoke cleared, the toy wagon emerged as a charred wreck. Young von Braun emerged in the firm grasp of a policeman. Despite being severely reprimanded by his father, the youngster's interest would not be denied. By the age of 22 he had earned his doctorate in physics. Two years later he was directing Germany's military rocket development program.
Von Braun and his colleagues produced a number of experimental designs, the most famous of which was the A-4 rocket, which has gained distinction in history under another name -- the vengeance weapon number two -- V-2 for short. The V-2 was the first successful, long range ballistic missile, and von Braun is credited as its principal developer.
As World War II drew to a close, von Braun led his contingent of several hundred rocket scientists and engineers -- all marked for death by the ***** to prevent their capture by the Allies -- into American lines.
In 1946, von Braun and his team arrived at White Sands, N.M., where, for the first time, von Braun learned of work done by the American rocket pioneer Robert Goddard.
Goddard's interest in rockets began in 1898 when, as a 16-year-old, he read the latest publication of that early science fiction writer, English novelist H.G. Wells. The book which so excited Goddard was later made into a 1938 radio program that nearly panicked our entire nation when it was broadcast. Orson Well's too realistic rendition of the "War of the Worlds" still causes many to shudder.
As the 20th Century began, Wilbur and Orville Wright were preparing to become the first men to fly. Goddard, however, was already designing rockets to probe the upper atmosphere and delve into space. Half a world away -- and unknown to Goddard -- a Russian school teacher, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, was thinking along much the same lines. Both came to the conclusion independently that, if a rocket was going to do the things they dreamed of, it would have to be powered by liquid fuels. Solid fuels of the time simply didn't have sufficient power. Tsiolkovsky lacked Goddard's practicality. While Tsiolkovsky worked out many principles of astronautics and designed suitable rockets, he never built any. By contrast, Goddard was a technical man. He could and did build rockets. By the time he died in 1945, Goddard held 214 patents in rocketry -- patents which still produce royalties for his estate.
Goddard began his experiments in rocketry while studying for his doctorate at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
He first attracted attention in 1919 when he published a paper titled, "A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes." In his paper he outlined his ideas on rocketry and suggested, none too seriously, that a demonstration rocket should be flown to the Moon.
The general public ignored the scientific merit of the paper -- latching instead onto Goddard's Moon rocket proposal. At the time, such an endeavor was absurd and most dismissed Goddard as a "crank."
The experience taught Goddard a hard lesson -- one which caused him to shy away from future opportunities to publicize his work. Publicity was far from Goddard's mind on the morning of March 16, 1926. On that day, barely a year after Wernher von Braun's rocket wagon fiasco, Goddard launched a liquid-powered rocket he had designed and built from a snow-covered field at his Aunt Effie Goddard's farm in Auburn, Mass. The rocket flew only 46 meters (152 feet) -- about the same distance as the Wright Brothers' first manned flight -- but it did fly! It was the first flight of a liquid-fueled rocket in history.
When Goddard was later approached by the American Interplanetary Society in 1930 to publicize his work, Goddard refused. The society, rebuffed and learning that no one in the United States aside from Goddard was working with rockets, turned its attention to rocket research under way in Europe, where rocketry was beginning to develop a following.
In the spring of 1931, two founder-members of the American society, husband and wife Edward and Lee Pendray, travelled on vacation to Germany where they made contact with the German Rocket Society, which had been formed in 1927. The visiting Americans were given a preview of the future when a member of the German Rocket Society -- Prof. ***** Ley -- took the pair to the Germans' rocket flying test ground in the suburbs of Berlin.
Returning home, the Pendrays filed an enthusiastic report of their visit, prompting the American society to build its first rocket. The attempted test flight in November 1932 ended with the American design firmly on the ground. It's unfortunate the Pendrays didn't meet another future rocketry hall-of-famer who also was a member of the German society. Rumanian-born Hermann Oberth wrote, in 1923, a highly prophetic book: "The Rocket into Interplanetary Space." The book enthralled many with dreams of space flight, including that precocious German teenager, Wernher von Braun, who read the book in 1925. Five years later, von Braun had joined Oberth and was assisting with rocket experiments.
By 1932, the German Army was beginning to show an interest in the German Rocket Society's efforts, and in July of that year, a "Mirak" rocket was launched as a demonstration for the head of the newly created German Army rocket research group, Captain (later Major General) Walter Dornberger.
Mirak didn't impress Dornberger.
Von Braun did.
Three months after the demonstration flight, von Braun was engaged to work on liquid propelled rockets for the Army. Most of the German Rocket Society followed von Braun into national service and the society disbanded.
By December 1934, von Braun scored his first successes with an A2 rocket powered by ethanol and liquid oxygen. Two years later, as plans for the follow-on A3 rocket were being finalized, initial planning began for the A4 rocket -- a rocket that was to be, in Dornberger's words, a practical weapon, not a research tool. As noted earlier, most know the A4 by another name -- the V-2.
The rocket researchers quickly outgrew their facilities at Kummersdorf on the outskirts of Berlin and, in 1936, operations were transferred to a remote island on Germany's Baltic coast -- Peenemuende.
Between 1937 and 1941, von Braun's group launched some 70 A3 and A5 rockets, each testing components for use in the proposed A4 rocket.
The first A4 rocket flew in March 1942. The rocket barely cleared some low clouds before crashing into the sea a half mile from the launch site.
The second launch in August 1942 saw the A4 rise to an altitude of 11 kilometers (7 miles) before exploding.
The third try was the charm. On October 3, 1942, another A4 roared aloft from Peenemuende, followed its programmed trajectory perfectly, and landed on target 193 kilometers (120 miles) away. This launch can fairly be said to mark the beginning of the space age. The A4, the first successful ballistic rocket, is the ancestor of practically every rocket flown in the world today.
Production of the A4 began in 1943 and the first A4s, now renamed V2s, were launched against London in September 1944.
The V-2 offensive came too late to affect the course of the war. By April 1945, the German Army was in full retreat everywhere and Hitler had committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin.
At an inn near Oberjoch, the Haus Ingeburg, von Braun and over 100 of his rocket experts waited for the end. The entire team had been ordered executed by Hitler to prevent their capture. Wernher von Braun's brother, Magnus, however, managed to contact nearby American forces before Hitler's SS henchmen could reach the rocket team. On May 2, the same day Berlin fell to the Soviet Army, von Braun and his rocket team entered American lines and safety.
With the fighting over, von Braun and his team were heavily interrogated and jealously protected from Russian agents. V2s and V2 components were assembled. German rocket technicians were rounded up. In June, General Eisenhower sanctioned the final series of V2 launches in Europe. Watching each of the three V2s which rose from a launch site at Cuxhaven was a Russian Army colonel, Sergei Korolev. Ten years later, Korolev would be hailed as the Soviet Union's chief designer of spacecraft and the individual responsible for building the Vostok, Voshkod and Soyuz spacecraft which, since 1961, have carried all Soviet cosmonauts into orbit.
Few members of von Braun's team participated in the Cuxhaven launches. Most had already begun setting up shop at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas. Piled up in the desert near Las Cruces, New Mexico, were enough parts to build 100 V2s. Von Braun and his team soon moved to nearby White Sands Proving Ground where work began assembling and launching V2s. By February 1946, von Braun's entire Peenemuende team had been reunited at White Sands and, on April 16, the first V2 was launched in the United States. The U.S. space program was under way!
Up to 1952, 64 V2s were launched at White Sands. Instruments, not explosives, packed the missiles' nosecones. A V2 variant saw the missile become the first stage of a two stage rocket named Bumper. The top half was a WAC Corporal rocket. The need for more room to fire the rockets quickly became evident and, in 1949, the Joint Long Range Proving Ground was established at remote, deserted Cape Canaveral, Fla. On July 24, 1950, a two-stage Bumper rocket became the first of hundreds to be launched from "the Cape."
The transfer of launch operations to the Cape coincided with the transfer of the Army's missile program from White Sands to a post just outside a north Alabama cotton town called Huntsville. Von Braun and his team arrived in April 1950. It was to remain his home for the next 20 years, a period in which the city's population increased ten fold.
The von Braun team worked to develop what was essentially a super-V2 rocket, named for the U.S. Army arsenal where it was being designed -- the Redstone.
In 1956, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency was established at Redstone Arsenal under von Braun's leadership to develop the Jupiter intermediate range ballistic missile. A version of the Redstone rocket, known as the Jupiter C, was used on January 31, 1958, to launch America's first satellite, Explorer I. Three years later, Mercury Redstones launched Alan Shepard and Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom on suborbital space flights, paving the way for John Glenn's first orbital flight.
In 1958, NASA was established, and, two years later, von Braun, his team, and the entire Army Ballistic Missile Agency were transferred to NASA to become the nucleus of the agency's space program.
The Army Missile Command, which owns Redstone Arsenal, continued its vital national defense mission after the transfer of ABMA to NASA, chalking up a remarkable number of successful programs to augment America's landpower. MICOM's successes include the Pershing II, the NIKE weapons systems, the HAWK system, Improved HAWK, Corporal, Sergeant, Lance and Chaparral, to name a few.
Pursuing a separate course -- that of developing rockets for space exploration -- the Marshall Space Flight Center's past quarter century has been a time of superlatives.
In 1961, almost as Alan Shepard was drying off from his landing in the Atlantic following his riding a Marshall-designed Redstone rocket on a sub-orbital flight which made him the first American in space, President Kennedy committed this nation to being first on the Moon. NASA's Marshall Center was charged with developing the family of giant rockets which would take us there.
The Saturn rockets developed at Marshall to support the Apollo program and to honor President Kennedy's pledge were, at the time, the most powerful space launch vehicles yet to have been invented.
Engineers, scientists, contractors, and other support personnel built well. On July 20, 1969, a transmission from the Moon's Sea of Tranquility reported: "The Eagle has landed."
Marshall's Saturn rockets first took us around the Moon, then to its cratered surface. Marshall-developed lunar excursion vehicles -- the ungainly Moon Buggies -- carried astronauts on far-ranging excursions in pursuit of samples of lunar soil and rock.
Closer to home, the team at Marshall developed America's first space station -- Skylab. Built to replace the upper stage of a Saturn V moon rocket, the Skylab module was successfully placed in orbit early on May 14, 1973.
Placing Skylab in orbit marked a major transition in the story of rocketry. Up until Skylab, the rocket had been the star -- the featured attraction. The focus had been on the up and down -- launch and recovery. Skylab, in essence stole the show. For the first time, space became a place in which to live and work. Flying aboard a rocket was about the Earthside equivalent of driving the family car to work. Just as having to drive to work is only incidental to work itself -- flying aboard a rocket became secondary to the work done once Skylab had been reached. The rocket, simply stated, became a means to an end -- the end in this case being the opportunity to learn to live and work in space.
A rash of malfunctions plagued Skylab's early days -- problems which tested the resourcefulness of the entire NASA team. The problems were overcome, however, and Skylab went on to become one of Marshall's proudest achievements.
A Marshall-developed Saturn I-B also carried aloft America's half of the first joint U.S.-Soviet space endeavor, the Apollo-Soyuz project.
After Apollo, the team at Marshall tackled designing a revolutionary national space transportation system, which came to be known simply as "The Space Shuttle."
It is anything but simple!
The space shuttle main engines are among the most powerful, most sophisticated devices ever invented. They represent a quantum leap in technology advancement over the engines which powered the Saturn V. Each of the three main engines in tail of the shuttle can provide almost a half-million pounds of thrust, a thrust equal to that produced by all eight of the Saturn I's first stage engines. Unlike most previous rocket engines, which were designed to be used only once -- and then for only a few minutes -- the space shuttle's main engines are designed to be used again and again, for up to 7.5 hours. The thrust to weight ratio for these engines is the best in the world -- each engine weighs less than 7,000 pounds but puts out the power equivalent of seven Hoover Dams!
Twenty-four successful flights of the space shuttle lulled America into a sense of complacency. Shuttle launches became routine -- a ho-hum event which had to scramble for an inch or two on page 2.
Then came the Challenger disaster....
The time since the loss of Challenger has been the busiest in the history of Marshall Space Flight Center. Teams of experts have been organized to find and fix the problems which led to the accident. Investigation quickly focused on a defective joint in the space shuttle's solid rocket motors. Rocket propulsion experts devised a number of modifications to the solid rocket motor design to remedy the fault.
A vigorous test program was undertaken to show that the problems had been solved.
The disaster-enforced hiatus in shuttle operations gave Marshall -- and other NASA installations -- an opportunity to address other shuttle-related concerns. Major steps were taken to enhance the reliability and safety of the turbine blades and turbo pumps in the shuttle's main engines. An escape system was created for the shuttle crew. Improvements were made to the orbiter's landing gear and brakes.
When America returned to manned spaceflight in 1988, it did so in a space vehicle which was vastly safer and more capable.
NASA also is examining using expendable launch vehicles on missions which do not require the shuttle's unique capabilities, and is looking into development of a new generation of heavy lift launch vehicles.
These will become the next chapter in the story of rocketry -- a story whose first chapters were written more than 2,400 years ago.
No one can say where our path will lead or when -- hopefully never -- the last chapter in this history will be written.
One extra factoid for those of you who made it this far...Goddard was mocked for his 1919 assertion of sending a rocket to the moon. The paper that had lambasted him in 1919 printed a retraction after the 1969 landing on the moon....A little bit of justice<p>'01 1.8T QMSPXB + ESP
08-31-2000, 06:07 AM
#4
more info: Goddard went to WPI before going down the road to Clark
While there he conducted a long string of experiments on electricity and magnetism. I could go on and on...
but I won't...
-Will
WPI Alumnus
and
Aerospace Engineer =)
but I won't...
-Will
WPI Alumnus
and
Aerospace Engineer =)
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