May 092010
Part of the first stage of the Titan II booster from the Gemini 5 mission was recovered at sea. It was not designed to be recovered, it was not meant to be recovered and it was not expected to be recovered… but nevertheless it *kinda* survived to be recovered. It was far from being reusable, however.
The first stage was likely intact when it hit the ocean, but it snapped in half. Shown here is the somewhat flattened remains of the upper thrid or so of the stage, the forward portion of the oxidizer tank.
5 Responses to “Inadvertantly recoverable launch vehicle”
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I can’t remember where I heard this but I think soembody was close enough to actually see one of the Saturn V first stages hit the water. NASA changed the size of the exclusion zone real quick afterwards!
That’s actually stored just across the interstate from me over at the Space and Rocket Center. It’s not viewable by the public though.
Would it be better just to recover the engines, rather than attempting to recover an entire stage? The tanks seem to be a relatively simple and easy to build part, compared to the engines.
IIRC one of the Redstone boosters from the Mercury-Redstone flights came down close enough to a ship that they reported it to the Coast Guard as a flaming airliner that had crashed near them.
The stage construction on the Titan II was fairly involved, as it used chem-milled metal sheet as the exterior skin to save weight and avoid the need to keep it always pressurized, like in Atlas.
Although that was very efficient from a weight point of view, it probably upped the construction cost of the stage over one using more conventional construction methods, like in Thor or Jupiter.
Here’s another first stage that came down pretty much intact, despite free-falling into the Australian desert rather than the sea:
http://davidwallphoto.com/images/%7B04FC4A7B-D4F5-4FDC-BF8F-89E4409EA87C%7D.jpg
That’s the first stage of a British Black Arrow satellite booster.
Can anyone identify the sounding rocket first stage in the background?
It’s one off a Nike Ajax booster – based rocket, but which one?