And The Rockets' Red Glare

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.

Comments

Kindly old Karma Vice Cop sez

[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!

Re:Illegal Fireworks?

[Bill Currie]

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.

Re:Challenger?

[Bill Currie]

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.

More Nuclear Fun...

[CrusadeR]

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!):

http://www.cdi.org/Issues/Nuk eAccidents/accidents.htm

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 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), 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

Why would they come?

[Thomas Charron]

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..

Re:Illegal Fireworks?

[Tijn]

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!

Re:Mucho Coolio

[Detritus]

Some can be found here. Peter Kuran made a film, Trinity and Beyond, that has some very impressive restored footage of nuclear weapons tests. A trailer can be viewed here.

Something for that rosetta stone..

[xtal]

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

Re:...

[anatoli]

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.
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Re:Whatever happened to beer?

[anatoli]

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.
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Re:Whatever happened to beer?

[anatoli]

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...
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Re:Whatever happened to beer?

[anatoli]

I protest against being moderated offtopic! This is about fireworks, and I just blew up his argument! Justice! I demand justice! Oh, whatever.
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Mucho Coolio

[Vanders]

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"? :)

this is a nice change

[jesterzog]

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, of course.)

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

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Blew up the netherlands

[SciBoy]

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. :)

Re:Blew up the netherlands

[grammar nazi]

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.

Voyage

[SciBoy]

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. :)