Fascinating HD footage of Apollo 11 Saturn V engines at 500fps

[JohnnyRingo]

Very immpressive slow motion film with running commentary of the engine burn from ignition to liftoff.

http://vimeo.com/4366695

Needless to say, the process is more complicated than lighting a fuse, but I had no idea so many events transpired in the 30 seconds after countdown minus zero.

[cleanhippie]

1. Wow. Very cool. And very complicated.

Funny how something that seems so simple is anything but.

[leveymg]

2. One, tiny subsystem that had to work of many - amazing accomplishment

To think that all the technology that went into that was gained in roughly ten years - when are we going to have another great leap forward? Are we capable of it?

May I suggest getting over our addictions to burning hydrocarbons and nuclear fission would be a worthy follow-up.

[Ready4Change]

4. Keeping the pad from being destroyed was a major feat.

I know someone who was involved with that. For a long time they just assumed they would need to build a whole new launch pad for every flight. Then they developed methods to use that super heated steam to carry away much of the heat. Without that, the whole area this film covers would have just become just one big hole.

[JohnnyRingo]

5. Actually, until this video I always wondered how anything under the Saturn V survived

I knew they had a deflector under the engine, but I didn't know about the cooling flood of water.

On edit; I also never knew there was a turbine involved. When I think of a rocket engine I assume it's a straight exhaust under a controlled explosion. That was pretty cool how they spool up the turbines with fuel that is sucked under when the engine lights.

[jayfish]

3. One thing lost in this video...

is a sense of how huge this stuff is. At the Kalamazoo Air Zoo they have a Saturn 5 engine suspended from the ceiling that you can walk under. It is just massive.



At the 5-minute mark of the video you can clearly see the device from the picture above (the tops are red-hot).An average man is well under the height of that hold-down. We used to do big things.

[shireen]

6. STUNNING!

Thank you so much for this link. That is really amazing video.

It's sad to see how the manned space program has devolved since then. Instead of wars, we could have had moonbases by now, and be on the way to exploring Mars. :(