How Did NASA Get Those Shots?

"I've been wanting to do this video for a long time.... Just how did they manage to get those spectacular shots of the stage separations of Saturn rockets? Many have asked over the years, so this one is by special request for all of you who have wondered about just that. OH - and hang on till the end to see the jaw-dropping unedited footage."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBITROWVcok

The following is not mentioned in her video. It's too bad they stopped using the cameras with Apollo 8 because this would have been very interesting to see on film:

2010 JANNAF Lessons Learned Panel Discussion
(PDF of PowerPoint presentation)

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7d...97396ccf23d.pdf

NASA Apollo Lessons Learned

AS-510 (Apollo 15) Stage Separation

Lesson: There are NO Small Changes

Purpose: Increased payload to the Moon

Changes:

– Eliminate the ullage settling motors on the S-II stage
– Eliminate four of the eight retro motors on the S-IC Stage.
– Delay stage separation and retro motor firing by an additional 1 second to increase
separation distance.
- Effective: AS-510 was the first flight that incorporated the change.

AS-510 Stage Separation
Results of the Changes

Excerpts from the AS-510 Flight Evaluation Report:

- S-IC/S-II first and second plane separations were accomplished
with no significant attitude deviations.
- S-IC retro motors performed as expected.
- Separation distance was less than predicted.
- S-II exhaust plume at engine start resulted in a more severe
environment at the S-IC forward LOX dome and resulted in S-IC
telemetry system damage.
- Analysis indicates that with an S-IC stage having only four retro
motors, failure of one retro motor to ignite would result in marginal
separation distance and, in the 3 sigma case, re-contact of the two
stages.

Implication: We could have lost the vehicle!

AS-510 Flight Evaluation Report:

https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/Docu...10-Apollo15.pdf

AS-510 S-1C/S-II stage separation. Note the lack of stage separation before S-II ignition and the plumes from the S-1C:

https://youtu.be/bvVtckdfmTE?t=2315

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Those are spectacular shots, though I fast-forwarded through much of the time following S-IC separation to interstage jettision. I never knew the S-II flew that long with the interstage attached. If I ever get around to building a staged Saturn V, separating between the SI-C and the interstage is more accurate.



SpaceX has to learn a similar lesson the hard way in their early days:

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna26061972


Bill

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If your June, July, August and September was like this, you might just hate summer too...

Please unload your question before you ask it unless you have a concealed harry permit.

: countdown begin cr dup . 1- ?dup 0= until cr ." Launch!" cr ;

Give a man a rocket and he will fly for a day; teach him to build and he will spend the rest of his days sanding...

I don't think it did. The Apollo stuff was filmed at 100 frames per second and normal film is done at 24 fps (30 for tv). If it was played back at normal movie speed of 24 fps, the video was a hair less than 1/4 speed of live action. I don't know if she also meant the frame rate for the Merc Atlas was 100 fps.

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At 100 fps, the video footage suggests around 30 seconds before interstage jettison. That is much longer than I had believed to be the case.


Bill

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It is well past time to Drill, Baby, Drill!

If your June, July, August and September was like this, you might just hate summer too...

Please unload your question before you ask it unless you have a concealed harry permit.

: countdown begin cr dup . 1- ?dup 0= until cr ." Launch!" cr ;

Give a man a rocket and he will fly for a day; teach him to build and he will spend the rest of his days sanding...

Subsequent reading confirmed the 30 second flight with the interstage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#S-II_sequence

That page also provides a couple of Saturn V variations to model. The Saturn INT-20 is an easy modification. The Saturn-Shuttle concept is visibly interesting, but may be difficult to make stable for flight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satur...Apollo_proposal

Finally, an interesting story about the discovery of an "asteroid" covered with titanium dioxide:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Discarded_stages


Bill

__________________
It is well past time to Drill, Baby, Drill!

If your June, July, August and September was like this, you might just hate summer too...

Please unload your question before you ask it unless you have a concealed harry permit.

: countdown begin cr dup . 1- ?dup 0= until cr ." Launch!" cr ;

Give a man a rocket and he will fly for a day; teach him to build and he will spend the rest of his days sanding...

The original scene, showing an S-IVB stage leaving, then igniting..... is not what most people assume it is.

It is NOT a Saturn-V launch, with S-IVB third stage separating from the S-II Second stage.

It is an early Saturn-IB launch (201 or 202), with the S-IVB second stage separating from the S-IB first stage.

The biggest visual clue, for those not familiar with the inside of a Saturn-IB interstage, is that the S-IVB ignites three solid "Ullage" rockets (about 120 degrees apart), that settled fuel into the tanks as the J-2 engine ignited. The Saturn-V's S-IVB only used two of those, about 180 degrees apart. BTW - those solid ullage motors were jettisoned right after they burned out, as dead weight no longer needed.

There were various camera pods ejected on Saturn-V flights, that were never found (off the top of my head, like 1/3 to 1/2 of them). One of those was an actual Saturn-V S-IB shot like the famous Saturn-IB one, but never found (it was way way farther downrange and a way hotter re-entry than that IB camera pod had to endure, so it ad long odds to begin with)

So many Apollo documentaries show that Saturn-IB staging footage as though it is a 3rd stage from a Saturn-V launch. But I can never really blame them, as it is such incredible footage, and is better to show than not (and sort of awkward to add "footage from a Saturn-IB" text into such a scene).

BTW - I'll note that I did not see the whole 30+ minute video, or scroll to the end, as for some reason in the last few months Youtube has made it impossible to scroll past stuff, for most videos that I watch (bizarrely I can do it on an Ipad easily, but not my "real computer" a Macbook running Chrome. But I used to be able to, and some videos I can but not most, whether monetized or non-monetized).

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It is not clear what you mean by "scrolling."

I can click-drag on that red dot and traverse through the video at high speed without sound. I can hover the mouse over the timeline bar and see frames as the video continues to play.

I primarily use Opera as my browser with the built-in ad blocker turn on by default. I am starting to use Microsoft Edge for more things this year, but have yet to watch YouTube with it, so cannot say how it behaves.

The hovering over the timeline feature does not work with a few videos with no obvious reason why.


Bill

__________________
It is well past time to Drill, Baby, Drill!

If your June, July, August and September was like this, you might just hate summer too...

Please unload your question before you ask it unless you have a concealed harry permit.

: countdown begin cr dup . 1- ?dup 0= until cr ." Launch!" cr ;

Give a man a rocket and he will fly for a day; teach him to build and he will spend the rest of his days sanding...

She completely explained all of that about 8 minutes into the video including which launches had better footage (Apollo 4). She also mentioned the last flight with pods was Apollo 8, who's staging pods didn't survive, but the LOX pod did.

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I love sanding.

I recall reading in some documentation over the years (NASA's "Stages to Saturn" book maybe?) that some of the film pods on various missions were sometimes not found for many weeks. Not sure if those lost that long still had usable film, but I think so. We will never know of course what footage we have missed from those pods that did not survive/were NOT recovered.

No doubt, some of that footage from those early Saturn 1b and Saturn V missions has become some of the most iconic of the early space age.

Earl

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Earl L. Cagle, Jr.
NAR# 29523
TRA# 962
SAM# 73
Owner/Producer
Point 39 Productions

Rocket-Brained Since 1970

I always thought this was a neat story... https://www.sandiegouniontribune.co...1231-story.html

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But it is rocket science!
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