Sad Grapefruit
Feb. 28th, 2018 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tbutler
This came up in discussion with friends last night... the Vanguard I satellite, victim of one of the more pathetic rocket launch attempts.
A bit of history... as part of the preparations for the International Geophysical Year, in 1957-58, the US decided to launch an artificial satellite, publicly announcing its intentions. But due to a whole bunch of politics (both domestic and inter-service military), the Eisenhower administration decided to base its effort, Vanguard, on civilian 'sounding' (research) rockets developed by the Naval Research Laboratory, instead of the military rockets developed by Werner von Braun at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency.
The Vanguard booster development was running behind schedule... and then this happened:
The Soviet crew, led by Sergei Korolev, launched Sputnik I, beating the US to the punch in October 1957. Khrushchev memorably described Vanguard as a 'grapefruit', much smaller than Sputnik I:
The end result was a highly embarrassing public failure, with the first launch attempt - Vanguard TV3 - getting just a bit more than a meter off the launch pad before the engine failed, leaving the rocket to collapse onto the launchpad and explode in an impressive fireball. To cap off the humiliation, the satellite was thrown clear of the explosion, and started cheerily broadcasting its radio beeps until someone finally ordered that it be put out of its misery.
The original TV3 satellite is on display at the National Air and Space Museum; the Vanguard satellite at the Kansas Cosmosphere is a flight-ready backup (as is the Sputnik I).
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Date: 2018-03-02 12:42 am (UTC)My father lost his right (preferred) hand thanks to Sputnik.
It was in Poland, with everyone super excited about the launch. My father hoped to study aeronautics, so he and a bunch of friends experimented with homemade rockets. They took of using regular gunpowder. Well, one day it was raining a bit and my dad thought the fuse had gone out so he went to check... He woke up in hospital, bandaged head to toe like a mummy, only his eyes showing. His first question, when he finally managed to move his mouth, was, "How high did it go?"
He almost died. Ended up with scars all over and his right hand torn off at the wrist. He was eighteen...
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Date: 2018-03-02 05:31 am (UTC)I'm glad he survived.
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Date: 2018-03-02 05:09 pm (UTC)And on the plus side, it was that passion that he transferred to me, giving me the love of science and science-fiction. So overall, yay for Sputnik!
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Date: 2018-03-02 05:16 pm (UTC)A friend of mine got up to somewhat similar antics when he was in college, though thankfully with no serious injuries. A couple of stories I remember in particular: the time he and his friends sent a rocket up far enough that he was afraid it might have been tracked by government authorities, and that by an unfortunate (and wildly unlikely!) fluke of chance, managed to destroy a car when it came down; and the time he and a friend dressed up as aliens to prank a local town... complete with a 'UFO' made with a saucer-shaped, hydrogen-filled balloon, that he set off as the conclusion to his act.
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Date: 2018-03-02 11:32 pm (UTC)