Sure I’ve forgotten more than one – there are so many great Space Shuttle clips out there. Movie trailer clips there have worked but weren’t exactly what I was thinking of. Still cool though.

As for the first paragraph there, I think that’ discussion is better left for a more appropriate and relevant thread.

But, in the spirit of anthropogenic effect upon the atmosphere +rocketry, I find no better example than Atlas V Sonic Boom Meets Sundog:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsDEfu8s1Lw

Greg Laden #12,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCIDBBEOz3o

The original concept was like what Virgin Galactic is doing, but on a somewhat larger scale: A winged first stage would carry the orbiter to about 50,000 feet, then release it to climb to orbit. This orbiter would have been smaller, more of a “people-mover” than a cargo hauler. The system would have been fully reusable.

Mark Wade’s Encyclopedia Astronautica says:

“The final shortcoming was that the shuttle was designed as if it had the inherent operating safety of an airliner. It was not equipped with any provision for crew rescue in case of booster failure during ascent to orbit, or being stranded in orbit, or structural failure during re-entry. The crew was not even provided with spacesuits, despite the lessons of the Soviet space program. This seemed an extraordinary act of engineering hubris, given that contemporary military aircraft were equipped with pressure suits and ejection seats. But the weight problem also meant that there was no margin for crew safety measures without (to NASA) unacceptable impact to the net payload.”

There’s a great deal more to the shuttle safety story, of course. I won’t belabor the point here. Just remember it as one more lesson in the high cost of short-sightedness.

I think the Space Shuttles were wonders of the modern world and behind only the Apollo-Saturn V craft as the greatest thing humans have ever built.

A couple of clips showing why I think is so :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=II7QBLt36xo

A tribute putting the Space Shuttle missions in context with everyone of the 135 flights included in chronological order. (But all in a mere eight minutes.) Challenger’s loss and Reaguns excellent memorial speech following it at the 2 minutes 50 seconds mark.

This is another tribute clip showing the details of one launch (STS-129 Atlantis) in all its splendour :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewLLBalvehg

Which I could watch a thousand and fifty plus times and never get sick of.

Oh, and just one more because, so durn good – a night launch (STS-130 Endeavour orbiter) :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEDLASr3QN0

to enjoy as well. If you haven’t seen these before, well you’re in for a treat – if you have, well they’re definitely worth viewing again. About my all-time fave youtube clips and what a spacecraft we used to have.

I hope we see its like – and better still – again in my lifetime.

***

“But out of the whirlwind came a silent bird from the stars, a symbol of our ability to work with nature, to use our intelligence and within the limitations of our world, to do great things.”
– David Levy on witnessing the 4th landing of the Space Shuttle Columbia’, Page 28, ‘Astronomy’ magazine October 1982.

In the case of the Saturn V that took men to the moon, this “bomb” weighed 2.5 million kilograms (RP1+LOX) and had the wallop of a small atomic bomb (0.5 to 1 kiloton of TNT).

So, while “it can’t blow up!”, it gets “blown upwards” for several minutes — until the craft has been accelerated to 17,000 mph on reaching orbit.

The Saturn V F1 main engines are a most amazing engineering feat. The combined power output of the five F1 engines of the Saturn V first stage was 60 gigawatts — nearly equivalent to the peak electricity demand of the United Kingdom.

Just the gas generator alone on the F1 produced about 31,000 pounds of thrust, more than an F16 fighter’s engine running at full afterburner. This auxiliary engine was used to drive a turbine producing 55,000 shaft horsepower for pumping fuel & oxidizer into the combustion chamber. Note that that was 55,000 horsepower just to run the F1’s pumps; the F1 itself (if you could rate rocket engines this way) produced the equivalent of something like 32 million horsepower.

It takes a lot of guts to trust that to hold together for 11-12 minutes to get into Earth orbit. (Then they had to trust the rest of the craft to keep them safe & alive for several days — and get them home again.)

I also remember getting pretty depressed when Columbia broke apart during reentry in 2003. I was an adult by then, of course, and a little less naive about the dangers, but there was a sinking feeling of “not again”.