Sunday, July 03, 2011

The Biggest Solid-Fuel Rocket Engine Ever Built

It never flew.

The construction facility and testbed sit moldering away in a Florida swamp:

Pssst: didja know we already landed people on Mars? No, really! Well, sorta really. From what I see on YouTube, someone's been using the place for a junkyard.
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6 comments:

  1. AnonymousJuly 3, 2011 at 9:55 PM

    Remember it well. Never been to the site but it was near the main entrance to Everglades National Park. At one time I lived in the area. If you recall the comment I made some time ago about the ATT tropo site on Card Sound Road, this site is probably about 10 miles due west. Forgot it was in 1963, the year I graduated from high school.

    Terry
    Florida

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  2. CincinnatusJuly 3, 2011 at 10:37 PM

    In a very short time, the US will cease having a manned space program. We'll go to third world status of having to hitchhike on Russian spacecraft.

    Unbelievable. Outrageous and unbelievable.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Fuzzy CurmudgeonJuly 4, 2011 at 10:10 AM

    WRT the alleged video of a Mars landing...too bad people don't understand that you would not have real-time communication between Houston and Mars. Even at the closest approach in 2003, radio would have been a six-minute round trip proposition.

    Unless they were using alien tech, of course, but you'd think the alien hyperwave wouldn't have all that RF static in it, wouldn't you?

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  4. Comrade MisfitJuly 4, 2011 at 11:44 AM

    At one point in the first vid3eo they report an atmospheric pressure of 707.7 millibars. That's equivalent to an Earth altitude of about 10,000'. They could go outside in shirtsleeves and jeans.

    But the Martian surface atmospheric pressure is a hundredth of a millibar, roughly equivalent to an Earth altitude of 50 miles. They used to award astronaut wings to anyone who flew that high.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Roberta XJuly 4, 2011 at 11:50 AM

    Hey, look, when it comes to faked videos, you have to take what you find. ;)

    ...Besides, everyone knows Mars has a shirtsleeve environment, NASA and the Russians are just lying to discourage colonization, right?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Chas S. CliftonJuly 4, 2011 at 6:14 PM

    Like Nathan, I watched the first YouTube, and my thought was, given the distance from Earth to Mars, shouldn't there be longer spaces in the conversation between sender and receiver? Someone wasn't thinking ...

    ReplyDelete

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