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Old 06-19-2010, 01:11 AM
luke strawwalker's Avatar
luke strawwalker luke strawwalker is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Needville and Shiner, TX
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VERY cool stuff!

You can see the entire clip (this is only a VERY small portion of it, including a LOT of the tank footage, including what happens to the fuel in the first stage tanks at staging when the ullage (or seperation) motors fire-- the camera takes a shower REAL FAST!!! Order the "Saturn I and IB" video from Spacecraft Films... The Saturn V video is highly recommended as well... heck everything Spacecraft Films has is terrific!!!

The footage with the hexagonal baffles is, IIRC, inside one of the LOX tanks in the first stage. Whether it was the central Jupiter tank or one of the surrounding 4 Redstone tanks I don't know-- though it LOOKS to be about Redstone size...

The second stage was from inside the liquid hydrogen tank. IIRC both films were shot by remote cameras looking through special quartz windows installed in the tank, with the tanks lit by exterior lights shining through their own quartz windows. The footage was taken by regular film cameras, somewhat like "gun cameras", installed in jettisonable pods which seperated from the stage and landed in the ocean under a parachute, which were later recovered. More than a few of these camera pods were used in both the Saturn I and V programs, and more than a few of them were never recovered-- some presumably were lost or sank, and some didn't seperate from the rocket stages properly and were lost when the stage broke up and splashed down, and I heard of a few turning up on remote beaches or found later on...

Interesting stuff... OL JR
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