My job as a mission flight control officer is to ensure public safety. I sit on console and monitor the performance of every rocket launched from the Cape. My displays show radar (beacon and skin), optical, and telemetry tracking of the vehicle in flight. I also have a telemetry system officer providing me with vehicle data such as chamber pressures, roll, pitch and yaw rates. If the vehicle becomes errant and violates destruct criteria I will send a command destruct function before the debris and propellants can reach the public. Post Challenger Shuttles only have command destruct packages on the SRBs so after SRB separation I would send an abort command to the Shuttle commander (based on information from JSC in conjunction with my display data) when certain public safety criteria is violated. It is then up to the commander to jettison the external tank in the designated safe area and attempt to land the shuttle. This kind of maneuver is rehearsed on the simulator but would be really sporty if the commander had to perform the maneuver during a real ascent. I take a lot of pride knowing that we do everything within our means to keep the public safe during launches. Rocket launches can go very bad and when they do the consequences can be colossal (do a search for the Long March 3B – Intelsat 708 launch from February 1996). There has never been a public fatality from a launch from Cape Canaveral but there have been cases where we needed to destroy errant rockets before they endangered the public.

Years ago I did the same thing and there is a lot of history there. Also was doing some skydiving in the area and if you were up very early in the morning or late in the day you could still see the bomb craters all around the area. The Allies really wanted to stop all development and bombed it often during the war.

A couple of pics of the plume from last week that I had in my phone.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1181612690.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1181612779.jpg

You didn't perchance jump from one of these?

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1181616709.jpg

One of our pilots in Berlin managed to log quite a few hours in one. Pretty unusual for the time.

It was pretty clear that the Soviets didn't do much to clean up the area. Bulldozed some things, but plenty of unexploded ordinance still around. Lots of the buildings looked like the last bomb dropped an hour ago. It was like stepping back into time, but left plenty of opportunities to explore if you got off the beaten track (carefully!). Glad you had a chance to see it. What history!

Oops - took the off-topic topic off topic. Sorry.

Dynamik

Way cool. Many years ago I was involved in assessing the acid that comes out of the exhaust of the space shuttle SRBs. The pH of the exhaust is something akin to battery acid. IIRC it comes from when they flood the launch pad with water so the reflected heat doesn't melt the space shuttle. A lot of the times they abort launch, IIRC are due to potential public exposure to downwind drift of the acid mist.