@@thethirdman225 the buckle happened maybe a 18-24 inches below the white square. it resulted in enough of a crack that we could hear the nitrogen leaking out. Eleven minutes later the crack propogated both up and down from that middle point and ripped the front wide open.
Gotta be careful of thermal cycling, keep your cyclists at a constant temperature! And microfractures ruining your day, keep your fractures on the macro scale! Otherwise it makes the error of your weight (and thus mass) measures complicated.
@@glenmcgillivray4707 methinks that the only advantage a macrofracture has over a microfracture is that you can see the former and decide not to use the engine.
Seeing that the SLS tank withstood *260% load* for *five hours* makes me feel pretty good. That's waaaay beyond anything they'd normally see - hell, if you could get that kind of reliability on every part I'd almost be convinced to scrap the launch escape system. Almost.
Having the structural integrity of your rocket be dependent on propellant tank pressure makes perfect sense, from the point of view that your rocket engine isn't going to work very well without it. The fact that the rocket folds itself in half if it loses tank pressure is an additional minor complication.
Its incredible those balloon tanks never collapsed during launch as the fuel was consumed and pressure dropped. I guess by the time that could happen, that stage is ready to separate?
They keep them pressurized with another gas or by injecting some exhaust, depending on the rocket! I'm not sure what Atlas used, but most rockets need pressure in the tanks to help fuel flow, so the falcon 9 uses helium, some russian rockets burn some fuel to add exhaust, and some others boil liquid nitrogen I think.
@@revenevan11 that Russian idea definitely sounds like a great plan. (In a Russian accent) "Let's mix hot gases with fuel and/or oxidizer to keep rocket safe"
@@thePronto lol, it totally does! Just like the germans and Russians using concentrated vodka as an early rocket fuel! But in reality the fuel and oxidizer are in separate tanks so it shouldn't cause any issues, since there's no oxygen in the fuel tank, and I'd assume an insignificant amount in the exhaust if things are going according to plan. But, there's probably good reasons we don't see it used today!
@@revenevan11 Atlas used helium in very much the same way as Falcon-9 does, except that in Atlas, the helium bottles were cooled by liquid nitrogen, while Falcon-9 puts the bottles directly in the LOX tank. Both rockets heat the helium by turbine exhaust before using it for tank pressurization. Russians did use gas generators to pressurize tanks on some rockets. Proton is one of such rockets that still flies. I think Russians had already experimented with this idea before the war, but so did the Germans. Karl-Heinz Bringer in Peenemunde have developed gas generators which burned hypergolic fuel components and then cooled the gas by injecting water. The resulting steam was inert enough to be used for pressurizing both the oxidizer tank and the fuel tank. After the war he went to France, and many French rockets used this system, including the first stage of Ariane-1 through 4, which also had its engines designed by Bringer.
6:25 Wait until the space deniers find that photo. They will go absolutly mad. I can already hear them saying things like "It's a proof that the Saturn five was a rocket-assisted balloon!".
Just like aluminum cans. Once saw a stack of aluminum cans over 30 ft high in a warehouse topple when a row towards the bottom was depressurized as a forklift scrapped across them.
Not a scientific test, but gives one an idea of the strength of pressurized metal cans. One coke can, well padded to distribute the weight evenly, can hold: opened can 77 kg pressurized full can 360 kg (from "How Much Weight Can a Soda Can Hold? Hydraulic Press Test" video)
Yes number 5! Great video Scott. I thought I knew some stuff about rockets. At forty years old I just learned that those cool looking metal rockets were balloons. Mind blown!
Flight computer: "Wait, I'm falling but we haven't launched yet? Throw error. Alarm, alarm. Fuck it, deploy the parachutes, it won't make things worse."
This is SLC-4 at Vandenberg. They were able to keep ground supplied pressure on the tank for about 4 hours but finally gas supply ran out and down it came.
This Atlas/Agena film looks a lot like some of my KSP designs failing after hitting the "launch" button except I get to watch the fiery graphics of KSP launch platform turn to rubble.
I never realized some rockets used nearly tinfoil thick aluminum. This explains a particularly catastrophic Titan II missile silo incident in Arkansas in 1980. The missile explosion was so powerful than seismometers in Colorado recorded an earthquake consistent with a tactical nuclear bomb going off.
Not aluminum -- hardened stainless steel. And though 0.4 mm is crazy thin, it is still 25 times thicker than the ordinary kitchen foil, and about 4 times thicker than the aluminum in the soda cans.
@@ph11p3540 These rockets certainly can be punctured by a sufficiently strong impact, but it is a lot harder to do than it may seem. The guy in charge of structural design at Marshall flight center at NASA also doubted the strength of Centaur tanks, so he was given a chance to wack the tank with a hammer. The hammer bounced off and knocked his glasses off. There was no damage to the rocket. [Source: NASA SP-2004-4230, page 38]
Personally I love the idea of a rocket that can send stuff like micro and picosats into orbit. As in a rocket that carries a 1kg or less payload. I know NZ has something that I think can launch cubesats, but it’d be cool to have a specific 1kg or less launch vehicle.
Balloon fuel tanks: that amazingly miraculous place in time and space where sheer insanity and sheer genius meet without too great of a disaster. ~( 'w')/
The secret payload was actually a micro black hole contained within a dilithium chamber. Obviously they forgot to align the tacheon flux capacitors correctly!
Or just putting a support beam inside! It's really sad that happened, I would've loved it to have survived there in Dayton until I got to visit the museum a few years ago.
How do balloon tanks maintain structural integrity while depleting their propellant? Why don't they implode once the pressure gets down to like 20% because they've used 80% of the propellant?
Physics dictates design. A side note - the Centaur tank dome at 7:12 looks just like the Starship dome SpaceX shipped from Florida to Texas. Same subtle curves, same segmented design.
Yes, it seems we had the same results when using hydrogen expanding tanks within the flying ( lighter than air ships ) at the beginning of the 1900s, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to relive it. So, are we still using rockets? The same method to leave the earth that the ancient Chinese employed, and yet we dream of the stars, but fly on the wind.
Filled with explodey stuff! Not sure if EXPLODEY is a real word but I'm stealing it anyway 😂 that's the word of the day EXPLODEY use it and use it often!
Is that the payload falling off the imploding rocket and failing to fully deploy its parachute? How was the parachute ready to go right away like that? What was that payload?
Is there some kind of device which keeps the pressure constant as propellant is burned? Or is the altitude gain fast enough that this isn't a problem? Still, I would imagine, even if the tank does not implode due to external pressure anymore, it would lose quite a bit of structural integrity with lower internal and external pressures at high altitudes?
AFAIK the Ariane 5 is designed for a pressurised tank (not sure if it would crumple immediately, but you shouldn't launch with an empty tank) and was originally planned to launch the Hermes spacecraft into space.
Scott Manley Thanks Scott...I always thought those early rockets (Atlas,Gemini) were modified to obtain a man rating. Maybe it was other systems involved in the modifications like redundancy for example....
Interestingly using pressure for structure is used everywhere, in the most unexpected of places. For instance coke cans use the liquid inside to remain strong, if was only due to their strength alone they wouldn't be able to support anywhere near enough weight when they're stacked and would require a huge increase to aluminium used. Pressure and a thin walled container really is one of the most efficient ways to make a device strong.
Trivia note: Werner von Braun was less than thrilled with the thought of using balloon tanks on any rocket, but particularly a man-rated one. He finally was persuaded to stop fighting the desire to use them when the Atlas program manager invited him to come down to the factory with a sledgehammer and try to put it through the side of a pressurized Atlas missile--apparently, both NASA and the Air Force put the kibosh on that idea right quick (more out of the worry von Braun would injure himself than anything else), but it got the point across.
Good story -- though some details seem to have been slightly different. It was not von Braun himself, but Willie Mrazek, von Braun’s Structural Section Chief. And he *did* get hit when the hammer bounced off. von Braun's mistrust for Atlas had to do with more than just its structural design -- despite program's eventual success, there were numerous problems early on. The details of the story can be found in this "NASA history series" report: "Taming liquid hydrogen : the Centaur upper stage rocket, 1958-2002" / Virginia P. Dawson, Mark D. Bowles. p. cm. (NASA-SP-2004-4230) On pages 38-39 you will find the following: _To quell Mrazek’s doubts, Bossart invited him to take a sledge hammer and give the tank a whack. Failing to put even the slightest dent in the tank, he tried again, this time giving the side of the tank a glancing blow that caused the sledge hammer to fly out of his hand, knocking his glasses off, but again leaving the surface unscathed. Although this test may have proved the strength of the balloon structure, it did nothing to endear General Dynamics to Mrazek or win the von Braun group’s faith in the ability of Centaur to lift an expensive spacecraft into space._
Reminds me of an old Aero Prof of mine who summed up a whole blackboard of equations with the phrase: "Zooo, as you can zee, no vhoosh, no zoom". I think he would have been perfectly happy with "explody stuff".
Implosion... An amazing word my language has no direct translation for, only for "explosion", and then you have to explain "implosion" with a couple of words. But "Implosion" is like... You hear it and you instantly know exactly what happened by just how it sounds. Rapid unscheduled shrinking. It was going well until it imploded!
Even worse before the mission has started. That's just a waste of an expensive dinner. And possibly the reason why she won't return your calls. Better watch "There's something about Mary"...
Fun fact: everyone's favorite un-sticker-izer, wd-40, was first invented to protect the fragile steel tank walls of the atlas rockets from rust which, even in very minuscule amounts, could catastrophically ruin their structural integrity.
I use it on the aircraft I work on, and when I'm asked why am I using stuff I bought at the local hardware store, I start with " Let me tell you what this cheap stuff was made for...." 😂😂😂
At my local public library, there's an interesting book about the Centaur: Author: Dawson, Virginia P. (Virginia Parker) Title: Taming liquid hydrogen : the Centaur upper stage rocket, 1958-2002 / Virginia P. Dawson, Mark D. Bowles. Publisher, Date: Washington, DC : National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Office of External Relations, 2004. Description: xiii, 289 pages : illustrations ; 29 cm. Series: NASA SP (Series) ; 4230. NASA history series. Subjects: Centaur rocket -- History. Hydrogen as fuel -- Research -- United States -- History. Liquid propellant rockets -- Research -- United States -- History. Other Author: Bowles, Mark D. United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Office of External Relations. Other Title: Centaur upper stage rocket, 1958-2002 Notes: Shipping list number: 2004-0200-P. Includes bibliographical references and index.
