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Space

And The Rockets' Red Glare 56

Posted by michael from the sats-bursting-in-air dept.
orpheus writes: "After the cops come and confiscate -er- 'your kids' illegal fireworks (yeah, that's the ticket), consider popping over to Space.Com for a special retrospective of clips and pictures of real fireworks in the 4th of July special section, "Triumphs and Tragedies Behind Launch 'Fireworks' featuring videos of when rockets go bad, and when rockets go right. It'll make you feel better about your own backyard suborbital ventures, as you brace yourself to rebuild your neighbor's doghouse." Thankfully, they don't have the Challenger. And keep in mind that most (all?) of those detonations were intentional, if a launch deviates from the flight-path it is destroyed so that it doesn't land on Tampa or Disneyworld.
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And the Rockets' Red Glare More

And the Rockets' Red Glare

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  • wray (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    i think it's more of a challenge aiming for the second post rather than the first

  • Challenger? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why not have the Challenger up there? I mean, if you're going to archive this sort of thing, go ahead and archive it.

    I don't understand what objections you could have to this.

  • Re:Blew up the netherlands (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yup, it was in Netherlands, and there was another one that blew up two days later in Greece, then about three days after that yet another one blew up in Spain. Bad luck comes in threes, I guess.

    The accident in the Netherlands was particularly nasty because it initially bought a lot of people out their houses to look at the fireworks going off, then a couple of minutes later the main silo exploded like a bomb, obviously a lot of the people were badly injured.

    "celebrate your country by blowing up a small part of it"

  • Kindly old Karma Vice Cop sez (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, begorrah, begorrah, begorrah, but aren't you a pretty one? Oi don't think oi've seen ye hanging round this district before? Are ye new to the game, dearie? Oh, don't try to fool Officer Moriarty, will ye? I saw ye standing there, skirt up around yer earholes, shouting out lame Moicrasoft jokes! Of course ye're a whore -- look at the blinkin' dollar soign instead o' the letter S! If I see ye hangin' round here when oi come back dahn this road, there'll be hell to pay, so there will!
  • Well, my source is the Challenger book. I'm not certain, but I think it was the force of them hitting the water that caused the capsule to break (and thus flood). But the book did say they were not killed by the explosion. I'll have to dig out my book in a few weeks when my stuff arrives (it's on a boat from NZ to Canada) and double check what the book actually said.
  • Australia might have had the brightest fireworks, but they definitly weren't the classiest. My vote goes to France and what they did with the Eifel Tower. That was just beautiful.
  • Actually, they didn't die in the exlosion. They drowned. The explosion rendered them unconcious and thus they couldn't escape from the crew cabin while it was filling with water.
  • As several of the missiles in question in Space.com's footage are ICBM's or SLBM's, I figured I'd provide some info on more general accidents perpetrated by the defense establishment (on the 4th of July, how patriotic!):
    So we've had more than our fair share of broken arrows and bent spears :) (the Spanish B-52 incident was particularly nasty). Also semi-amusing was some poor bastard drawing the duty of parking an armored vehicle on top of a silo whose Minuteman III was apparently preparing to launch itself...

    Incidentally, the DoD is preparing to run the next NMD ground-based interceptor test on the 7th, which presumably will decide whether we'll deploy the thing or not... reading testimony [defenselink.mil] from the Defense Dept. concerning a previous test is like reading an Abbott and Costello routine:
    Q: Why didn't you tell us about these problems last fall after the first test? I mean, why are we hearing about this now?


    SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Honestly?

    Q: Sure.

    SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Didn't see then as problems.

    Q: What? SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Didn't see them as a problem. I mean, and maybe it's because we're lowly material developers -- you know, all we do is test. But, yeah, there's anomalies that happen on every test. And in fact, I would be concerned when we start doing tests if we don't have anomalies.

    Q: The question is why you didn't tell us about the anomaly?

    SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: My answer? Didn't think it was that important, to be honest with you.

    Q: We were told last fall it was a successful test, things went well.

    SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Yes. Yes. And it did. And I will say the same thing. It was a successful test; went well. Were there anomalies? Sure.

    Q: Well why weren't we told about them?

    SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Didn't think it was that big of a deal. To be honest, I --
    More info on NMD and the EKV system proposed could normally be found at the BMDO's site (http://www.acq.osd.mil/bmdo /bmdolink/html/bmdolink.html [osd.mil]), but it seems down at the moment, so you'll have to settle for the press release:

    http://www.defensel ink.mil/news/Jun2000/b06202000_bt350-00.html [defenselink.mil]
  • Nice video's (and lots of formats as a previous poster points out), but why no sound. I _need_ that kaaabooommm :-)
  • Why in gods name would they come confiscate my fireworks? Perfectly legal here in NH. Just yesterday I went to www.epyro.net, ordered a bunch up, and went down to the store to pick 'em up.. ;-P It's not illegal everywhere, you know..
  • Henceforth, I urge you people, don't drink cheap shitty beer!

    Is there such thing? Oxymoron?

    On a nice festive day celebrating over 200 years of freedom, I have to look deep in my bottle before me and analyze the contents. What we have here appears to be is the essensial barely and hops with lots of little happy alchohol producing workers called yeast each with a happy face doing thier thing. How they do it, I'm not sure. Some say its when they produce thier ATP energy packets from the sugar molecule, they aren't as efficient in doing so and release a few molecules of alchohol as a byproduct. Now, I wouldn't say its a byproduct or waste, but a gift. Yessir, our fine beverages are brought to us by the generous contribution of our favorite little organisms called yeast.

    Now some people would like to call some kinds of beer cheap, trash, or piss water. I'm here to tell you all yeast have one job and all are here to serve our country in thier best ability. Its all from fine grain stock and the rest is from marketing hype, so give your respect for these important patriots and drink up.

    Mine, I prefer bottom of the barrel dark beer. My friends hang out in lowly places.


  • I think you're not quite correct on this one:
    Fireworks are built for either the loudest bang or the brightest flash, while explosives are built for the biggest blast. Usually fireworks have fairly small amounts of explosives in them, packed in relatively large amounts of paper or plastic, so piling up a lot of fireworks will give you just a lot of little explosions most of the time, because the fire first has to burn through the paper/plastic before it ignites the powder. Even if this takes half a second, this is enough to spread the energy of the blast over a much longer period of time than the split-second of one large explosion.

    Why there was a big blast in Enschede is still not clear; there are several theories about it:
    - The company stored high-order explosives as well as fireworks. Very unlikely, Dutch government is very strict in regulations with explosives and weapons, and the company was known as very good and safe.
    - The company stored raw titanium or magnesium for light-effects in a relatively large quantity. The fire-brigade didn't know this, tried extinguishing the fire with water, and hydrogen gas was produced by a reaction between the titanium and the water.
    - Because of a small fire the temperature and pressure in one of the bunkers got so high that the fireworks inside ignited, and the actual blast was not the fireworks going of, but the bunker literally bursting open. Quite unlikely, because these bunkers were built to withstand a blazing fire for at least 10-15 minutes.

    We might never know what caused the blast, but all I know for now is that we were extremely lucky everything went so perfect after the disaster; the mayor and public services (from all over the country and across the border from Germany) did one perfect job!

    My 2ct. for this thread; hope you enjoyed it.

    Tijn

    PS: Later on in this thread they're bickering about which lager's the best? Try Grolsch: three weeks after the blast the part of their factory that didn't burn down was running again!
  • Some can be found here [vce.com]. Peter Kuran made a film, Trinity and Beyond [vce.com], that has some very impressive restored footage of nuclear weapons tests. A trailer can be viewed here [vce.com].
  • yeah.... we need more stories about stuff exploding on slashdot!! Perhaps we could get an explosives icon as well, just so I don't miss any exploding stuff disguised as something boring.

    I haven't checked em all out yet, but the "Cruise Missile Mayhem" one is genius! For dramatic effect, try cranking the 1812 overture on your stereo while you watch them...
    da da da da da da da-da-da BOOM BOOM! :)

    Richard
  • Just a small point, space launchers usually _never_ have aerodynamic stability. Usually you're in what's essentially a vacuum before you're one quarter the way to orbit so as you'd need active control from then on and any aerodynamic, stabilising fins would also be dead weight it's easy to see why designers don't bother with them and just use active contol from the ground up.

    OK the Saturn 5 moon rockets *did* have small fins but AFIK their job was to keep the thing stable just long enough for the escape system to trigger if there was a really bad guidence system f*** up.

  • (I mean, if Minesweeper can crash, what about a rocket carrying a 1 billion $ satelite would do?.

    I would think a self respecting geek would balance his parenthisis. Regardless, I've never seen, nor heard of an instance of Minesweeper crashing.
  • A crashed satalite in Disney would give them a free adventure ride with the usual level of saftey Disney are renowned for.

    Look at the shuttle after Goofy couldn't convert to metric system and Donald was the voice over at launch control.

    Just need to find a way to put 2 giant circular ears on the wreckage.

  • ... some people in the world do live in seperate time zone to America. Me included.

  • Hey now, I live in Tampa, and these rockets better not come my way. Maybe they'll fall into the bay and create a natural coral reef as the toxic chemicals kill all natural sea life and eventually me becuase I eat fish.
  • This was a fine thing to post on July the 4th. Yes, as was posted earlier, there have been a number of scary incidents involving nuclear weapons. However, there have also been some truly wonderful results: putting a man on the moon, having wonderful photos of the cosmos, communicating to anywhere on the globe.
    I grew up a military brat. I was born at Patrick AFB, at the Cape. My father was a geodetic surveyor for the Air Force, and so I lived at mostly missile bases- F.E. Warren in Wyoming, Vandenberg in California.
    Every summer, the ICBM crews would fly their missiles into Vandenberg in C5a Galaxies, and then fire them off in training. Watching all those Minutemen IIIs go into the sky, heading downstream to Kwajalein (sp., i'm sure) Atoll was a thrilling experience. Supposedly, they would land in the middle of it, thanks to my dad's work (and 1000s of other peoples, too) on the guidance system.
    I also got to see a good chunk of the GPS satellites go into orbit, and also watched the first MX missile, aka Peacekeeper, launch.
    At the time, I wished that we lived somewhere that had fighter planes, or bombers, or some active squadron- instead, we only saw big transports and such. Now, though, I can't imagine growing up any other way.
    One time, during the halftime of a water polo match, a minutemen went up. It was near winter, and was about 9pm. It was a normal launch, except for one thing: at about 50 degrees on the horizon, its vapor trail left a glowing cross that stayed in the sky for about 15 minutes. I still don't know why it happened, but it's one of the prettiest things I've even seen.
    Even after the glory days of the space program, with its vigor, there was still an aura of excitement that was more than just military: it was geek excitement, that of making things, things that worked in spectacular ways, even if their intended purpose wasn't always nice. That aura shaped me, made me what I am, a computer professional, and I'm happy today for it. This is a wonderful country, and I hope Americans never lose sight of it.

  • How to build rockets might be a good thing for that rosetta stone.. If nothing else, it could tell people (?) to go look for the little monument we left on the moon :). Rockets (stable rockets, that is) are a pretty big engineering feat, one I believe that took almost a decade to make reliable enough to do useful work (unfortunately this "useful work" was to launch nuclear warheads.. maybe we could leave that part off the stone :).

    When I used to build rockets I think I had about a 60% failure rate on or near the launching pad.. when you think about it, those nasa rockets need to hang at near-perfect balance for a significant period of time before they get any degree of aerodynamic stability. The control systems for 'em are something else *flashbacks to industrial controls* nooooo..

    kudos

  • What happens when a nuclear bomb test "goes bad"? ...does it blow up?

    HA-haha
  • You know, it just isn't a 4th of July without hearing about some poor kid losing their fingers on the 10 o'clock news.

    I remember going on a smuggling run into Wisconsin(from Minnesota) to a small fireworks store near the border. We got there before it opened, and the 5 other cars that were there all coincidentally had Minnesota plates. I felt like Han Solo.
  • Ariane 5, a $500,000,000 rocket, crashed because of a software-related problem. And the software was not from M$. Far from it.

    Please don't flame me on this. I know why Ariane 5 crashed. I've read the report. You might just as well say it was a hardware-related problem, or a harware-to-software-interface-related problem. Whatever.
    --

  • Quoth the poster:
    LAGER, not BEER
    Quoth the dictionary:
    Beer (?), n. [OE. beor, ber, AS. beór; akin to Fries. biar, Icel. bjrr, OHG. bior, D. & G. bier, and possibly E. brew. 93, See Brew.]

    1. A fermented liquor made from any malted grain, but commonly from barley malt, with hops or some other substance to impart a bitter flavor. Beer has different names, as small beer, ale, porter, brown stout, lager beer, according to its strength, or other qualities. See Ale.
    Hope it helps.
    --
  • And you are starting to sound like a man who desperately needs to grab a dictionary and look up "irony". Or is it me who's starting to sound like a man who desperately needs to grab a dictionary and look up "irony"? Man, I'm lost...
    --

  • Re:Whatever happened to beer? (Score:3)

    by anatoli ( 74215 ) on Tuesday July 04, 2000 @02:44AM (#959520) Homepage
    I protest against being moderated offtopic! This is about fireworks, and I just blew up his argument! Justice! I demand justice! Oh, whatever.
    --
  • I can see it now, "When good rockets go bad"

    "My favorite part is when the rocket blew up"

    -- Tyler
  • Actually, they do have the Challenger...

    It's not advertised on the front page, and Categrized under Historical Documents, it's there more as a Chronicle "This is what happened", just as war footage would be. Let's remember those who gave their lives... Going into space is a dangerous task, Astronouts know this and willingly take that risk with every mission. Seven people died that day in 1986, we need to remember our mistakes to prevent them in the future. "Those who do not study history are bound to repeat it"

    Chris
  • Well, I agree the whole thread is offtopic, but my reaction was simply rectifying a glaring mistake made by someone claiming to rectify a glaring mistake. And now it seems you can regain the lost karma point by making a somewhat funny reaction to that. But of course, since that example is so close to my parent post, it wouldn't work again. *sigh* Oh well, I'm only a recent slashdot addition, if I compare my single digit karma to the 150 points someone else boasted recently, allthough I now believe my karma would be in the twenties if I didn't care so much for checking on reactions to my posts, so I can do the replyers the courtesy of answering if they question me. The link under my alias at the top of the opening page seems the best place for checking all I have posted, and the replies to those contributions, but I have noticed my karma was one lower each time I couldn't contribute a change to another factor.

    Is this so? Is there another way to find your posts or the replies to it? Is there a non damaging way to check your karma? After all, karma is likely supposed to be the total of the appreciation of your contributions to slashdot. And if you're not supposed to know how much your appreciated, why bother with karma at alll?

    Stefan, trying to understand the underlying assumptions, reasoning and mechanisms of the karma system.
    It takes a lot of brains to enjoy satire, humor and wit-

  • Well, you're right about the fireworks accidents in Enschede and Spain (I don't know anything about one in Greece, but that might have escaped my notice), but there is something mighty strange happening in /. When I read your post, it mentioned a container without fireworks blowing away, and over 2000 people killed, but after I hit reply, the resulting post above the reply "editor" box showed nothing of that aat all.

    I guess I've fallen for some bug troller. Oh well, 'nuff said.

    Stefan.
    Whether the bug is in slashdot or Netscape 4.61, I refuse to comment at this stage.
    It takes a lot of brains to enjoy satire, humor and wit-

  • Steinlager and Heineken are LAGER, not BEER. This is a common misconception amongst most of the English-speaking world. Lager and Beer are brewed differently using different types of yeast and have a totally different flavour/texture. Lager is usually preferred by immature palates.
  • This is Just plain BS.. only 21 died.. about 800 injured, but this meant everybody who had even the smallest of wound and went to the doctor. 400 homes were hurt enough not to let people go back to, or were in an area where the houses would have been torn down any time soon, so they might just get at it anyways in stead of building them up to tear them down. I know this, cause I live in Enschede.
  • Now those Videos were very, very, cool. I just love to watch things explode :) Trident missile tests are the best, they tend to cartwheel before they go boom. And the early V2 tests are funny.

    Something else i'd love to see is videos of Fission and Fusion bombs. Those are cool too, but i havn't seen any encoded and available on the internet. Anyone know where i can find some? Or some more Trident "mishaps"? :)
  • Fireworks should be legal. When they are legal they can be controlled.

    Guns are legal in the US and quite obviously can't be controlled very well, or at least not as well as in most countries where they aren't.

    And the other question is: What's the difference between fireworks and explosives that can level a large house? Answer: none, as is evident after the explosion of a fireworks factory in the Netherlands some time ago destroyed a sizable part of a town and killed some 20 people.

  • I canceled my Cable to pay for broadband Internet, and I am still seeing ads for Fox "When [insert item here] go bad" programs!!
    ARGGH!
  • This guy is a poster child for censorship!
    And coming from a Libertarian thats bad

  • Maybe we should send the URl to those guys going for the prize for the amature manned space launch prize ;-)
  • So, are you calling NASA a Mickey Mouse organisation?

    (Yes, I know I stole this joke)
  • Both. My fault. I should have added a smiley or something.
  • I remember the first firework display I went too. I was 4 years old. The guy in charge of it, for reasons I don't quite remember now (it WAS 25 years ago) he had a rocket in his pocket (no, I'm not trying to be funny, for some reason he had a small firework rocket in his pocket) and it somehow got lit. It exploded and badly injured his leg and as a consequence the display, which took plac every year, was cancelled indefinitely and never returned.

    This put me off fireworks for years. Given that kids get injured regularly with fireworks, maybe there's something to be said for seeing the horrible injuries that can happen with them.

    Regardless, if you're American, enjoy your Independence Day. I'm not anti fireworks, but what I saw was certainly a VERY harsh lesson as to the dangers.

    ---

  • Great link!

    Now I'll be a little bit more attentive with those bottle rockets :P

    ---
    Connection closed by foreign host.
  • I am not sure about you, but watching people die is not my idea of fun.
  • I think the point was that all the footage was of deliberate detonations - where no-one was killed.
  • Nope, they obviously blow down...:-)
  • I put the package together, and the reason I decided to not include the Challenger was that it's, well, pretty darn morbid. The idea was a kind of combination of something Fox News would have done, like "When Animals Attack," with an equal number of spectacular launch successes to balance it out and not be too negative.

    Including Challenger would have made it akin to broadcasting videos of fatal plane and car crashes.

    Hope you don't mind me poking my head in here.

    Rob Myers

    Multimedia Producer, SPACE.com

  • This is actually a myth. The force they would have hit the water with would have been more than enough to kill them even if they didn't die in the explosion.

  • And where's the video clip of the Challenger exploding? Maybe it wasn't a "rocket" but that was quite a display.

    Happy fourth of July from Nasa! We just wasted billions of dollars on rockets that don't work.

    ::music blares::

    America, America...

    --

    Okay, okay, I should be nicer... NASA has done a lot of great stuff, and I thank them for it. What they used out of necessity, has become some of our favorite play things. Thanks for the semiconductor!

    This post made with top-secret space technology.


  • Wow. A site that offers a range of formats and in some cases even lets the user decide what viewer to use. (Referring to the video gallery [space.com], of course.)

    I wish every media provider was as flexible as this one. Someone out there likes me. :)


    ===
  • Don't know if you Americans remember this accident a few months back where a wearhouse with tonnes (metric) of fireworks blew up. The nasty part was that the wearhouse was in the middle of a town. They might as well have dropped a bomb in there, several blocks where just levelled to the ground. Now THAT is an accident with fireworks...

    I only post this because it seems like people are finding a hard time coming up with something to reply to this story. :)

  • In Voyage by Stephen Baxter he writes about a last effort from NASA to send a manned mission to Mars. It's very interesting, since Baxter preceeded the book with a detailed study of NASAs history and succeeded it with a lot of proofreading from NASA scientists.

    It tells of how we today essentially have little or no clue to how they made those old Saturn 5 rockets work. If we had to use them again today we'de basically would have to reinvent them. There is a lot of problems with making a stable burn at the center of the exhaust so that maximum thrust is produced but where the fuel doesn't build up into a bubble that explodes. I wouldn't want to go into those flow calculations. In the book they just take the test engines and make a lot of changes by heart (like they did in reality) changing the shapes of the bells, changing the rate of flow of coolant and fuel and so on...

    Very little science and a lot of engineering. :)

  • Re:Blew up the netherlands (Score:3)

    by grammar nazi ( 197303 ) on Tuesday July 04, 2000 @02:07AM (#959545) Journal
    This /. story takes me back to the following memory...
    I was 10 years old and lived next to a rifle range. One year, the police brought all of the fireworks that they had confiscated out to the field at the rifle range. Using a backhoe, they dug a huge hole in the field and proceeded to fill it with the bounty. This was after they had filled their automobile trunks with and even given me some fireworks. One officer started pouring can after can of gasoline into the hole. 5 cans in all.


    Finally the time came and one officer threw a flare into the pile. Immediately there was a huge explosion and all of the fireworks flew into the air with a ton of dirt. What happened next was cool! The fireworks were lighting, but they were going off in the air and on the ground all over the whole field. The police were running for cover, but they were being bombarded by dirt, exploding fireworks, and soon-to-be exploding fireworks. Some even landed in my yard which is at least 100 yds away. I'll never forget watching the cops run for cover while sparks, flashes, and bangs were going off around them.
    What's the moral of this story? Cops are stupid! Just kidding, but those cops were stupid.

  • Wow, that had so much to do with the topic at hand didn't it? What happened, did you see the story, couldn't think of anything intelligent to say so instead you thought "I know, I'll just bash Micro$haft, that's always a winner". Zealots like you give this site a bad name.

    In future, if you can't think of anything relevent to say then don't say anything. Your comment added as much to this story as a first post.



    ---
    Jon E. Erikson
  • Fireworks should be legal. When they are legal they can be controlled. And if fireworks don't have to be bought from a dealer or whatever kids don't get into contact with hard fireworks you know. less crime and that.... sorry - I'm having a bad day
  • Actually, guns are controlled (if you can call it that) on a federal level, while fireworks laws differ from state to state, I think. I know here in Pennsylvania anything more dangerous than a sparkler or black snake requires a fireworks license, but that doesn't prevent hundreds of people from bringing in whatever fireworks they want from other states. Really, it does seem sort of pointless to have such stringent laws for something that simply can't be enforced.

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