![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Rockets, rockets, everywhere...
Aug. 24th, 2005 12:50 pmI went to sleep around 11 pm last night, after finishing a side translation for another client. I set the alarm on my cell for 1:15 am and decided that, if I really felt lousy when it went off, I'd skip the Dnepr launch. As it turned out, I felt fine when the alarm went off, so I joined the intrepid crowd aboard the bus and dozed for most of the way to the same place we visited for the Soyuz launch a few days ago.
Unlike the Soyuz launch, this time our bus parked in the lot about 50 yards behind a plain brick building that serves as an observation point for spectators. The military was not letting anyone get through, including one large Mercedes decked out in enough chrome to plate a battleship - which surprised me - but after a few minutes, some unseen signal was given and a small sea of spectators was permitted to walk over to the observation area.
As I approached the building, I noticed a bright display on the wall, reminiscent of the gaudy advertising on the front of a Coke or Pepsi vending machine. It was so vivid (or I am so well trained), I almost started to fumble through my pockets to look for spare change. As it turned out, the display was a large-screen plasma screen that was showing an image of the immediate launch silo area together with an illustrative diagram showing how the rocket was positioned in the silo. I had to look twice to convince myself that the image was actually computer-generated.
Hope springs eternal, it is said, and despite the fact that previous attempts at night launch photography have come up with less than satisfacoty results, I broke out the Canon, as did everyone else with a camera. As we all waited for the launch, I reviewed what little I had learned about the Dnepr rocket, which in an earlier era was basically a Soviet R-36M2 intercontinental ballistic missile, referred to by NATO as the SS-18 "Satan."
The rocket is a three-stage, liquid-propellant fueled vehicle that can place 4.5 metric tons of payload in a 200-km high orbit. Each stage is powered by a single engine (there are six at the noisy end of a Proton). In light of its ancestry, the Dnepr is most conveniently launched from an underground silo.
Also unlike the Soyuz launch, where liftoff occurred nearly 6 minutes after the "one minute before launch" announcement was made over the public address system, the folks from Cosmotrans - who were running the show - actually provided an old-fashioned countdown from the 10-second mark.
At zero, a gout of smoke and flame suddenly appeared in the darkness, soundlessly (as it took a number of seconds for the sound to reach us). It reminded me of a Barnum & Bailey magic act. Then a little magic really did happen, as the rocket popped out of the ground, dancing on a narrow, tapering flame. It seemed to me that it hung there, momentarily, as if making up its mind where it wanted to go, and then fled heavenward. I had pre-aimed my Canon in the direction of the launch area and snapped the following photo "blind" a second or so after launch:
Eventually, the roar of the engines enveloped us as the Dnepr gained altitude and pitched over, headed generally south, and tearing a hole in the sky like the proverbial bat. At a little after 2 minutes into the flight, the first stage engines shut down, shrinking the moving yellow dot that was the rocket's first stage engine to a ruby red color that was clearly visible despite the distance between us and the rocket. There followed separation and ignition of the second stage engine, and the Dnepr became indistinguishable from any of the bright stars that managed to wrest their share the sky from the moon, which has been on the wane for only a few days.
That would have pretty much been it had it not been for the computer-generated images on the plasma screen on the side of the building. When I got there, an animation of second-stage shutdown and separation was playing, and then the third stage was shown to deploy some smaller engines pointing forward (with respect to the direction of motion). The animation - and presumably the payload - then performed a 180° pitch maneuver (so that now the engines were properly pointing backward), and continued on its way. A map to the side of the animation showed the position of the rocket.
The following shot shows the unusual configuration of the third stage and its engines, and the map on the right shows the rocket to have traveled to a point over the eastern tip of the Saudi Arabian peninsula. Unfortunately, my flash tends to wash out the image, but it was the only expedient way of getting some kind of image that was not blurred.
We got back to the Fili at 4:30 am and I experienced hardly any trouble falling back to sleep, as the best effort in this direction that I was able to muster on the bus was to doze between potholes in the road.
* * * Getting up at 7:30 am this morning was what I imagined getting up at 1:15 am to be. Groggy, I performed my ablutions and went through the motions of shaving and still managed to get to the van without incident after having poured a cup of coffee down my throat. Upon arriving at 8:30, Sergey informed me that I'd be supporting a tour of hall 111 for the propellant team, which has completed its work and is scheduled to leave Baikonur before the start of combined operations.
Since all of the Russian managers were involved in a meeting, there was only our security escort around to tell us about the Proton and its history. Some of what I remember includes a launch thrust of 1,000 metric tons and a launch weight of 700 metric tons (I'm told it's always important for the first number to be larger than the second. :^).
Here's a shot merged from two images of the Proton, which is in the final stages of being readied for integration with its payload.
It's time to get ready to call it a day (I'm was the morning guy today). Laundry calls, methinks, and there are a couple of invoices to send. Not to mention there's a celebratory event tonight: the traditional prop team party. (More work).
Cheers...
Unlike the Soyuz launch, this time our bus parked in the lot about 50 yards behind a plain brick building that serves as an observation point for spectators. The military was not letting anyone get through, including one large Mercedes decked out in enough chrome to plate a battleship - which surprised me - but after a few minutes, some unseen signal was given and a small sea of spectators was permitted to walk over to the observation area.
As I approached the building, I noticed a bright display on the wall, reminiscent of the gaudy advertising on the front of a Coke or Pepsi vending machine. It was so vivid (or I am so well trained), I almost started to fumble through my pockets to look for spare change. As it turned out, the display was a large-screen plasma screen that was showing an image of the immediate launch silo area together with an illustrative diagram showing how the rocket was positioned in the silo. I had to look twice to convince myself that the image was actually computer-generated.
Hope springs eternal, it is said, and despite the fact that previous attempts at night launch photography have come up with less than satisfacoty results, I broke out the Canon, as did everyone else with a camera. As we all waited for the launch, I reviewed what little I had learned about the Dnepr rocket, which in an earlier era was basically a Soviet R-36M2 intercontinental ballistic missile, referred to by NATO as the SS-18 "Satan."
The rocket is a three-stage, liquid-propellant fueled vehicle that can place 4.5 metric tons of payload in a 200-km high orbit. Each stage is powered by a single engine (there are six at the noisy end of a Proton). In light of its ancestry, the Dnepr is most conveniently launched from an underground silo.
Also unlike the Soyuz launch, where liftoff occurred nearly 6 minutes after the "one minute before launch" announcement was made over the public address system, the folks from Cosmotrans - who were running the show - actually provided an old-fashioned countdown from the 10-second mark.
At zero, a gout of smoke and flame suddenly appeared in the darkness, soundlessly (as it took a number of seconds for the sound to reach us). It reminded me of a Barnum & Bailey magic act. Then a little magic really did happen, as the rocket popped out of the ground, dancing on a narrow, tapering flame. It seemed to me that it hung there, momentarily, as if making up its mind where it wanted to go, and then fled heavenward. I had pre-aimed my Canon in the direction of the launch area and snapped the following photo "blind" a second or so after launch:
Eventually, the roar of the engines enveloped us as the Dnepr gained altitude and pitched over, headed generally south, and tearing a hole in the sky like the proverbial bat. At a little after 2 minutes into the flight, the first stage engines shut down, shrinking the moving yellow dot that was the rocket's first stage engine to a ruby red color that was clearly visible despite the distance between us and the rocket. There followed separation and ignition of the second stage engine, and the Dnepr became indistinguishable from any of the bright stars that managed to wrest their share the sky from the moon, which has been on the wane for only a few days.
That would have pretty much been it had it not been for the computer-generated images on the plasma screen on the side of the building. When I got there, an animation of second-stage shutdown and separation was playing, and then the third stage was shown to deploy some smaller engines pointing forward (with respect to the direction of motion). The animation - and presumably the payload - then performed a 180° pitch maneuver (so that now the engines were properly pointing backward), and continued on its way. A map to the side of the animation showed the position of the rocket.
The following shot shows the unusual configuration of the third stage and its engines, and the map on the right shows the rocket to have traveled to a point over the eastern tip of the Saudi Arabian peninsula. Unfortunately, my flash tends to wash out the image, but it was the only expedient way of getting some kind of image that was not blurred.
We got back to the Fili at 4:30 am and I experienced hardly any trouble falling back to sleep, as the best effort in this direction that I was able to muster on the bus was to doze between potholes in the road.
Since all of the Russian managers were involved in a meeting, there was only our security escort around to tell us about the Proton and its history. Some of what I remember includes a launch thrust of 1,000 metric tons and a launch weight of 700 metric tons (I'm told it's always important for the first number to be larger than the second. :^). Here's a shot merged from two images of the Proton, which is in the final stages of being readied for integration with its payload.
It's time to get ready to call it a day (I'm was the morning guy today). Laundry calls, methinks, and there are a couple of invoices to send. Not to mention there's a celebratory event tonight: the traditional prop team party. (More work).
Cheers...
