4 thoughts on ““Wallops Island Is Burning””

  1. That’s a good article.

    I’ve never witnessed a rocket launch in person, except for a few Estes rockets and a couple of Wallops launches from my home 170 miles away. (The LADEE launch was pretty thrilling. I got to see a real moonshot from my front yard!) But that article gave a good impression of what it must be like.

    On a positive note, I hear that the pad damage is not as bad as initially feared.

  2. I’ve only witnessed one live launch*. It was a Delta II out of Vandenberg carrying that spy satellite that Bush ordered destroyed. There was some confusion on the part of Vandenberg security police. I went to one location, only to be told I had to move to another location. When I got there, another SP told me to go back to the first location. I told him that I’d comply but that they needed to make up their minds as to where we were to go.

    Perhaps the biggest thing about a live launch over watching one on TV is the sense of speed and acceleration. On TV, they track the rocket and you don’t get the sense of acceleration because there’s nothing in the background. Watching it live, you see it start off slow but keep getting faster and faster.

    *I did get to see a full duration static test of a Saturn V first stage at MSFC in 1966. I was 9 years old. It was very cool. Not as cool as a friend who was in the VIP stands to watch the launch of Apollo 17 (only night Saturn V launch) but cool just the same.

  3. I think it’s too early to really know the extent of the damage. A lot of it has to do with the angle you observe the pad from. When viewed to the north you can see the top half of the south facing part of bldg. in the foreground south facing picture is missing. Also there is clearly impact damage to the water tower tank in the south facing photo. The feed lines from the northern LOX take are gone (compare lines with southern LOX tank for comparison. I’m assuming the systems are symmetrical). The concrete around the north LOX tank appears wet, while rest of pad area is dry. Water condensation due to LOX leakage and evaporation? The tankage appears intact but can’t tell much from this distant photo. But if the rocket had fallen just a few dozen feet farther inland it would no doubt have been worse for the pad.

    To wit: Rand, do you think it makes sense to have a launch abort system along with range safety charges even on uncrewed vehicles for pad damage mitigation? In this case the LAS would fire while remaining attached to the entire rocket for when g goes to zero or negative in first 30 seconds after launch, then auto-safed and jettisoned later. For Antares. For SpaceX LAS is already part of Dragon design. If a LAS could have forced the rocket just a few dozen feet or so further seaward (downrange) the pad damage would be far far less. Explosion effects are an r**2 phenomena no?

    1. do you think it makes sense to have a launch abort system along with range safety charges even on uncrewed vehicles for pad damage mitigation?

      LAS is designed to save payloads not move rockets. And a payload might not be able to survive the gees pulled by an LAS.

      If you did put an LAS system on a rocket which was capable of moving the rocket in the manner you suggest, you have introduced a new failure mode. I watched a bunch of rocket launch failures on YouTube a couple of days ago (half an hour of a zillion launch failures from the V-2 rocket to near present day). A common failure mode was loss of attitude control. When the rocket sudden decides to enter space sideways, bad things happen. Normally, it just causes the rocket to break up spectacularly, but the worst case of this was the 1996 Long March rocket failure in China which is thought to have killed hundreds of people when a rocket tilted over and veered into a nearby village.

      An LAS can fire when it’s not supposed to and create this sort of problem.

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