05-04-2019, 04:09 PM
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Master Modeler
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
Posts: 6,507
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Here (see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=00abi75edBI [this one gives a reason]) and here (see: http://www.youtube.com/results?sear...entaur+explodes ) are ^color^ films of the Atlas-Centaur F-1 vehicle's short flight. Films of the spectacular on-pad failure--at the same pad F-1 flew from--of Atlas-Centaur AC-5 in 1965 (this video contains several excellent views, with sound: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YViFMC-ejKQ ), which fell back after rising just a few feet when one booster engine shut down, are also in the above-linked listing. Also:
AC-5 was carrying a Surveyor model, which was intended to be boosted into a lunar trajectory (likely to a hypothetical Moon in the real Moon's orbit, as was done with other Atlas-Centaur test vehicles). The vehicle could--and later did--send Surveyor landers to the Moon via direct-ascent trajectories, but it took a lot of work to perfect the Centaur's parking orbit restart capability, which offers--even today, with the Atlas V--much greater mission planning flexibility for lunar, interplanetary, and planetary missions. Without the restart capability, there were several months of the year in which the Atlas-Centaur (the early ones, at least) had no viable lunar launch windows; ^with^ the parking orbit and Centaur restart capability, there was at least one lunar launch window each month. |