Quote:
Originally Posted by devodave
Cool! I imagine the shock wave was pretty impressive.
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It was a fraction of energy of a shuttle launch, but we were allot closer and there was no sound suppression system on the test stand like they had on the shuttle launches. So yeah, on the bigger tests it was intense.
And the full force lasted for the entire burn, where a shuttle would be long gone after a short time.
But most of the time they were testing smaller 2nd or 3rd stage motors which weren't all that powerful and they only tested solid-fuel engines there.
Once in a while we'd get to see a bigger 1st stage ICBM motor test like for the minuteman II for morton-thiokol.
Fun-fact: at the time the titan and atlas ICBMs were liquid-fueled and the fuel was highly corrosive so it had to be stored separately. That meant that it took up to an hour to fuel them up and get them ready to launch. No such thing as satellite launch detection systems back then, so by the time we were ready to retaliate it might have been too late. Not good.
The minuteman rockets were solid-fueled, so they could be ready launch in a minute's notice. Hence the name
minuteman launch:
Moon booster:
