Very appropriate thread to be revived on April 1st.

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It's April 1 all right.....we even made Jay say "Paradigm Shift!"

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"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Riiiight. It's all fun and games until a zombie thread starts eating someone's brain.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Somedays I feel it is too late for my brain.

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If it's just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.
Contact Carl Sagan

No brain, no pain!

Wait, is that how it goes?

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"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery

ugh, can we just kill this thread, it's well past its useby date

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There is no dark side of the moon really, as a matter of fact it's all dark - Pink Floyd, The Dark Side Of The Moon

It's not just me then....

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And while with silent,lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
put out my hand and touched the face of God. JGM

The above quote has no religious significance whatsoever

After pulling two cruises on the flightdeck of the Connie I've heard some impressive sounds. Some of the most Gawdawful of which is the noise the arresting gear makes when you are below decks next to the machinery spaces that contain the cable squeezers.

But the all time most immpressive sound was when we rammed a 5,000 ton freighter, (The Bangler Joy out of Pakistan) with our 85,000 ton aircraft carrier at 1 AM doing about 30 knots. The whole 4.5 acres of 3.5 inch thick flight deck warbled like kids shaking sheet aluminum to make "thunder" during a school play. It was absolutely the "basest" note I've ever heard in my life.

I was going to make a couple of jokes here but seeing as how folks on the smaller ship died when they passed down our port side and their cranes sheared off a five ton fire control radar, which fell through their main deck into their engineroom, I felt suddenly uncomfortable about it.

We broke their keel amidships as well. In the light of the full moon I could see the ship's forepart bobbing one way while the aft part bobbed in the opposite direction held together only by ruptured hull plating. Those guys were seriously AFU.

BD

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

BigDon, you *have* to tell the rest of that story. How did a freighter sneak up on you ;-) and how many people flushed their career's down the toilet over this?

The game of "bumper boats" happens with depressing regularity. Back in the 1989-93 timeframe there were two collisions in the Straits of Malacca between Navy destroyers and a larger merchant ship. I read the accident report on both incidents. On the second report, the "lessons learned" section simply read, "None. Previous lessons still apply."

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"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery

I only read the first page but just to throw in my .02$ on the "why didn't they stand closer to the rocket" thing.

I am in the US Air Force, stationed at Vandenberg AFB and work on the Air Force Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Test Launch Program. Taken from the front page at www.vandenberg.af.mil :

Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.
Vandenberg Air Force Base is headquarters for the 30th Space Wing. The 30th manages Department of Defense space and missile testing, and placing satellites into polar orbit from the West Coast, using expendable boosters. Vandenberg is located on California's "Central Coast".

In the past 5 years I have been a part of the launch of about 15-20 Minuteman III and Peacekeeper ICBM's. When we launch any rocket from the western range all traffic is stopped and more then 10 miles from ICBM Launches. Depending on which launch site they are using for orbital flights they will decide where to block the roads at for those but no one ever gets closer then about 5 miles to a launch. It has nothing to do with how inherantly safe or unsafe the rocket is and everything to do with the fact that your launching 100,000lbs + of rocket into space. Make the rocket as safe as you want but getting from the ground to earth orbit is a dangerous job. I was standing on the roof of my office (formerly known as the Operational Test Launch Facility or OSTF when it was built in 1959) when we launched the last Titan IV. I was probably a good 8-10 miles away from that launch and you could feel the sound wave hit you in the chest when when it passed. I'm not sure I would have wanted to be any closer to it

In short, they keep a distance for safety sake. That is hardly proof that the rocket was a prop.

I have nothing scientific to add to either negate or reinforce ones belief in these things. But simple minds as my own wonder, just where on Earth were you during these events that would make you question their occurance???

Some of us weren't. (Now, granted, I don't question their occurance, but it's still a legitimate answer for the younger set as to where they--we--were.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

To add my own $.02, I have heard it said that the press covering the Apollo launches were given, at their own request, a location closer than the NASA blockhouse to the pad.

After the first launch (presumably a test launch), they asked to be moved back.

Unfortunately I don't have a cite; I'll see if I can find it at home tonight. No guarantees though (so this may be just my own imagination).

Edit: Fixtated mispaling of NASA. :-(

OK, found more details. My source doesn't say anything about being closer or moving back, but it does make quite clear how overwhelming the sound was. The launch was an unmanned launch on November 9, 1967 designated AS-501, with the empty CM/SM being designated Apollo 4. (The History of Manned Spaceflight, David Baker, Ph.D., Crown Publishers Inc., 1982; page 294).

I can't find any reference to how far away this was, other than 1) the Launch Control Center was "nearly 5km away" and 2) the sound arrived at the viewing stands at least sixteen seconds after ignition, based on the information in the book. At roughly 344 m/s for sound, that would make it more than 5km away. [344 m/s is the speed of sound in 21C dry air at sea level, according to Wikipedia.] Presumably, based on this, the stands were in the vicinity of the Launch Control Center.

As I said, there's no reference to the stands or press being moved back, but again, based on the description, I doubt very much they'd want to be that close for the next launch.

Further, based on this description of the physical discomfort and just plain force of the sound, it's pretty clear that being closer would be stupid - if not suicidal - as earlier posters have explained.

There's also an interesting passage I came across a few pages later: (ibid, page 304.) So if Apollo was irrelevant, the HB claims that it was to distract from other events such as Vietnam are weak. (Not that such claims were strong to begin with, of course.)

-GRM

Since Tofu asked...

It was about 36 hours prior to the run-up to the attack on Iran to rescue the hostages. We were near the Gulf of Aden, off the main shipping lanes under full signal security. That means no radar, radio, can't even use the ships intercom or even put power on aircraft without permission.

I knew it was going to be a different day when I woke up that afternoon. In my squadron we were on 12 and 12. 12 hours off and 12 hours on. Seven days a week when we were at sea. So our shifts ran 7 to 7, AM to PM or vise versa. I was on the nightshift at the time.

So why was this afternoon so different? I went to bed that morning with both hanger bays empty and upon arising both hanger bays were full of mines!

Now I'm not talking about little wussy mines that blow the toes off Armymen or give a Main Battle Tank a flat tire, but big honking ship killing mines. And no, they aren't round knobby things anymore. They look like big green hot water heaters on steroids. Came in two flavors. One laid on the bottom and waited for you to pass overhead before detonating, driving a column of water through your ship, (That whole liquids don't compress thing, lethal down to 110 feet) AKA Bottom Mines and another, which also lay on the bottom, that detected an enemy vessal and then launched a torpedo at it, AKA CapTor mines. (Captive Torpedo) The Connie and her sisters were going to mine every harbor the Iranians had. Thickly too.

Couldn't help but think, "Hmmm, looks like somebodies going to get hurt here."

Anyway, the UNREP was still underway and we were taking on stores long into the night. At 1 AM myself and another man, AT2 Dave Kalchik, were troubleshooting a gripe and I was standing on a tool box, armpit deep in the port side avionics bay. The Passumpsic (AO-7) was tied up to our starboard side giving us fuel and the destroyer theLangley was tied up to the far side of them.

When the 1MC came on and in an "excited" voice the airboss came on and announced, "Emergency break away! Emergency breakaway!" and they then sounded the collision alarm. (Which, as far as alarms go, is rather anti-climatic. Sounds like somebody doing morse code, four dots repeating.)

Dumb ol' me, I remember thinking, "What the heck? You don't do emergency break away drills at the beginning of the evolution, you wait until the end, when all the work is done, so you don't have to re-tie up with each other."

Well now. The first thing I thought was that the Passumpsic had lost steerage. Another carrier a week earlier in the Pacific had its attending oiler lose steerage and the venturi effect drew the two ships together. They were locked together in a mutually destructive, grinding dance for about 45 minutes.

So I thought was happening here. I went over to the starboard side and watched in utter amazment as the Langley did one of those supertight destroyer turns to starboard that leave the deck on the inside of the turn underwater. I've only ever seen that once, but I've seen it. If there had been any kind of a sea state she would have taken water down the stack.

Now the Passumpsic. It was still making headway, but it was bobbing hard left and right, which didn't disuade my first assumption, that she had lost steerage. Then, all of a sudden, she got her act together and turned hard astarboard as well. Without, I might add, wanting for the emergency break away to finish. She just pulled away and parted about five different high pressure fuel lines. (Wow, I just remembered how it smelled, hundreds of gallons of JP5 volitilising into the night air) Which hosed down the bosun's mates who were handling the lines. Sometimes you just don't want to be drenched and standing ankle deep in fuel. This would be one of them.

So now I'm standing back from the deck edge, inboard and aft of the island as we made a turn hard astarboard as well and I recall turning to Dave and saying, "Why is the collision alarm still on? The Passumpsic is making good head way away from us!"

When several things happened at once.

As I had turned my head to the left to say this I noticed a guy running aft from up forward with his arms over his head in a panic screaming, "In front of us! In front of us!"

Then we hit. I actually saw the ripple in the flightdeck move towards me. After it passed, my legs had that pain you get from jumping down from too high.

Then my brain went into that weird hyper-concentration mode. Things look like they are moving in slow motion.

The next thing that crossed my mind was bottomless cold horror. The only civilian ships we had passed for the last two days were liquified natural gas tankers. Ramming one of those would have constituted a Very Bad Thing. And for several moments that's exactly what I thought had happened.

When you really, really think you are about to burn to death or be blown to flinders your brain sort of compartmentalizes itself. Forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain. I was wanting for the sound of ruptured LNG hitting the water and freezing it and an overwhelming smell of gas (I know, the smell is added later, but I was "tense") when I saw the Big Black Cranes. It was here that my midbrain got all giggly with relief. LNG tankers don't have those four large cranes on each side.

Here's what those cranes were doing.

They looked like giant black skeletal fingers reaching over the port side deck edge. As the Bangler Joy passed down our port side the bobbing action caused the "fingers" to rise and fall and they took out the landing light system, which made a godawful mess of broken glass all over the forward part of the angle AND started shearing off the portside catwalk. Now that's a weird memory. The catwalk has a floor of perforated heavy guage steel 5/8th of an inch thick, with heavy tubular steel railings. It was curling up like an apple peeling. 400 feet of heavy guage catwalk curled into two full spirals. When this got even with me the was a pause as the cranes sheared off the earlier mentioned fire control radar, and the whole mess then fell away from me, thank God.

The Bangler Joy then stove in the newly replentished SAM warhead magazine, (Terriers, I believe they were) which I was standing on top of, then passed clear of us. The bulkhead in the magazine was pressed in to within two inchs of a pallet of warheads.

They then sounded General Quarters. I remember running to my shop in a dream-like state. I thought we might have been holed below the waterline. I got to the shop and tried to tell my people what just happened. My voice sounded curiously muted to my own ears. My shop chief, ATC Dave Baker, grabbed me by the shoudlers, shook me, and was trying to tell me something but I couldn't hear what he was saying either.

That's because I was so jacked up on adrenilin I was jumping up and down and screaming, "OHMYGODWEJUSTHITANOTHERSHIPANDITTOREOFFTHECATWALK ANDTHELANDINGLIGHTSANDITHINKWEAREHOLEDBELOWDECKS!"

The only injuries we sustained were the usual broken arms and noses we get every time we go to G.Q. for real, due to guys running through the hanger bay and tripping over tie down chains. Happens every single time.


No body lost their job. We had no radar, we were tied to another ship, we were off the shipping lanes. Our helo pickets saw the other ship but the entire crew of the Banglar Joy was asleep with no watch.

Our ship's captain was Bud Edney, who still made Admiral. He was good at his job.

We called him the Sea Fox. Which is really good when the peons come up with a cool nickname for you. But thats another story.

BD

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah

Wow, so many crazy theories..

lemme pick one:

ok so, why are the enginers and control staff so "far away" if they are confident in their enginering.

well point number1: if the rockets were FAKE, then why would they be scared of them at all? if the saturn V is just a fake shell on top of a very tiny conventional rocket, then what is there to be afraid of?

point number 2: lets assume the rocket isn't fake.. so did you consider that while the rocket is with in parameters for safe launching, maybe they wern't THAT confident in the safety of the rocket? also, the only reason the astronauts are so close to the rocket is because they have to ride it

bizzarr idea i know, but say the rocket launches and it does explode and we pretend the overwhelming evidence that the rocket is real is true. that is a LOT of explosive material sitting there. If the rocket fails you're GOING to lose the crew, nothing can help that, danger of the job.

but why risk the lives of every enginer, flight controller and anyone else? who'd be left to learn from any mistakes if they all foolishly and blindly "believed" that their work was so perfect that they sat on the launch tower to watch.


so maybe they're sitting so far away because one of the largest rockets ever made might be a tad dangerous.

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...the poor square has to say, "Well, I was in some other mystic dimension, called UP!" -C.S.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. -C.S.

Remember, you just have facts, you have mere facts. -worzel (said with sarcazm)

"Pain is just weakness leaving the body." -unknown

All throughly dealt with back in 2002 when this thread was new. Its always a good idea to check the date on the original post and read all the replies before posting.

Was this supposed to be funny?

And would you like to have been standing 1 mile away from Mt. St. Helens when it Erupted? Or how would you like to be standing next to a ICBM in it's silo when it was test fired.

Oh I know, how would you like to be hiding in a lumber yard when a tornado rolls through?

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