The Briefing Room
General Category => Military/Defense News => Topic started by: DemolitionMan on October 15, 2017, 02:16:02 am
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As any space enthusiast knows, beachball-sized Sputnik was the first manmade object to orbit the Earth after it was launched by the Soviets in October 1957. But it's possible the US managed to put an object into space a few months before that.
In 1956, astrophysicist Dr Robert Brownlee was asked by his boss at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to figure out a way to test nuclear weapons underground. The scientists working on Operation Plumbbob were concerned about the amount of radiation spewed out by the nukes during tests above the surface, so Dr Brownlee started experimenting with the idea of blowing up small a-bombs below the surface.
"Most of the radiation generated in a blast has a half life of about four hours," Dr Brownlee, 91, of Loveland, Colorado, told The Register. "We figured you could keep everything in but for a few per cent by going underground. But Mother Nature can outwit you in a great variety of ways."
In July 1957, for an experiment codenamed Pascal A, the team drilled a borehole 500ft deep for what was to become the world's first underground nuclear test. Unfortunately, the bomb yield was much greater than anticipated – 50,000 times greater, apparently. Fire shot hundreds of feet into the air from the mouth of the uncapped shaft, in what Dr Brownlee described as "the world's finest Roman candle."
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/16/america_soviets_space_race/
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Pascal A is listed in the Operation Plumbbob series:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
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I remember looking for Spudnik that October...and seeing it.
Looking back, it was probably the most pivotal event of the 20th century outside of the wars..
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I remember looking for Spudnik that October...and seeing it.
Looking back, it was probably the most pivotal event of the 20th century outside of the wars..
It was but the Soviet Union lost the ultimate prize: The Moon. You have to thank our Germans under the leadership of Dr. Wehrner Von Braun. You also have to thank General Bernard Schriever for the development of the ICBM.
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Well...actually if Korelov hadn't died in 66 the USRR may have beat us to the moon by at least a year.... :shrug:
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It was but the Soviet Union lost the ultimate prize: The Moon. You have to thank our Germans under the leadership of Dr. Wehrner Von Braun. You also have to thank General Bernard Schriever for the development of the ICBM.
"Nevertheless, in 1963, von Braun, reflecting on the history of rocketry, said of Goddard: "His rockets ... may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles".[75] He once recalled that "Goddard's experiments in liquid fuel saved us years of work, and enabled us to perfect the V-2 years before it would have been possible."[76] After World War II von Braun reviewed Goddard's patents and believed they contained enough technical information to build a large missile.[77]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard
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Well...actually if Korelov hadn't died in 66 the USRR may have beat us to the moon by at least a year.... :shrug:
"At the very top level were the fundamental systemic problems. These prevented the Soviet Union from successfully completing a number of major projects begun in the 1960's. These included virtually every large-scale aerospace project attempted: the moon program, the supersonic transport, the new generation of military aircraft, and development of digital avionics"
http://www.astronautix.com/r/russiawhydisethemoonrace.html
http://www.history.com/topics/space-race
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"Nevertheless, in 1963, von Braun, reflecting on the history of rocketry, said of Goddard: "His rockets ... may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles".[75] He once recalled that "Goddard's experiments in liquid fuel saved us years of work, and enabled us to perfect the V-2 years before it would have been possible."[76] After World War II von Braun reviewed Goddard's patents and believed they contained enough technical information to build a large missile.[77]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard
But History records the victors and that victor is Von Braun. Von Braun did blaze the path with is V-2 rocket.Yes, Goddard was instermental in the V-2 but it was Von Braun who fully developed it.The V-2, however, was technically far more advanced than the most successful of the rockets designed and tested by Goddard. The Peenemünde rocket group led by Wernher von Braun may have benefited from the pre-1939 contacts to a limited extent but had also started from the work of their own space pioneer, Hermann Oberth; they also had the benefit of intensive state funding, large-scale production facilities (using slave labor), and repeated flight-testing that allowed them to refine their designs. Oberth was a theorist and had never built a rocket or a working engine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Oberth
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Interesting article, thanks for posting it.
My brother was a NASA scientist in the Apollo program. He helped create the lunar sample analysis lab at NASA's Houston spacecraft center. After the first moon landing, he was interviewed by Russians by phone. He recently retired from NASA, one of the last Apollo era scientists to retire.
As he told me when I visited his Houston spacecraft center lab as a child, neither the USA nor the USSR would have had a space program as soon, as advanced without building upon Third Reich science.
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Interesting article, thanks for posting it.
My brother was a NASA scientist in the Apollo program. He helped build the lunar sample analysis lab at the Houston spacecraft center. After the first moon landing, he was interviewed by Russians by phone. He recently retired from NASA, one of the last Apollo era scientists to retire.
As he told me when I visited his Houston spacecraft center lab as a child, neither the USA nor the USSR would have had a space program as soon, as advanced without building upon Third Reich science.
It was built up by Third Reich science. A few people do not know this that Von Braun was an SS officer but we "sanitized" his sins under Operation:Paperclip.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/history/vonbraun/bio.html
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It was built up by Third Reich science. A few people do not know this that Von Braun was an SS officer but we "sanitized" his sins under Operation:Paperclip.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/history/vonbraun/bio.html
I asked my brother if he ever met Dr Von Braun. He told me Von Braun worked at the Marshall Space Center in Alabama, so he never met him. He said, Marshall built the rockets and JSC flew them.
It's interesting that Von Braun went on an expedition to Antarctica in 1967. I bet that gets the conspiracy theorists' blood pumping!
https://archive.org/details/MSFC-6752864
http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/photo/13.html
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I asked my brother if he ever met Dr Von Braun. He told me Von Braun worked at the Marshall Space Center in Alabama, so he never met him. He said, Marshall built the rockets and JSC flew them.
It's interesting that Von Braun went on an expedition to Antarctica in 1967. I bet that gets the conspiracy theorists' blood pumping!
https://archive.org/details/MSFC-6752864
http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/photo/13.html
Its interesting why he was there. It does raise some conspiracy theories.
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Its interesting why he was there. It does raise some conspiracy theories.
This is interesting...
" In 1966/67 antarctic summer, von Braun participated in a U.S. government expedition to Antarctica. The expedition was one of the first to systematically search the ice surface for meteorites believed to originate from the moon, for later use as a reference material."
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Wernher_von_Braun
There have been meteorites from the moon and Mars found in Antarctica.
My brother [who analyzed Apollo lunar samples at JSC] was also NASA's curator for Antarctic meteorites.