Yep! He had all of the experience from getting the V-2's in the air.

Unfortunately - and with Soros money electing his brand of corruptible judges - it is very difficult to go through all of the levels required to finally get back to reason.

Thanks. I'll keep that in mind if I ever get there.

...and all the while the lawyers and lefty judges get involved.

Titusville is 70 minutes from campus and 40 minutes from my house. You are always welcome to join!

Thanks for the explanation, NS - I was at the same place as 73S - spinning in circles in the ole' brain.

He has been working on doing that, with some success. However, it is fairly embedded and is going to take time. It is always amazing to me how a system can get FUBAR'ed in one Democrat term and then the adults come back in the room and it takes two or more terms to unwind.....

I don't make it to Florida anymore because the relatives I had in New Smyrna Beach passed away, but I have a brother with a place outside of Titusville but he is rarely there. It would be a hoot if I could sit in the back of one of your classes and just listen in and I'd buy you a steak dinner for the privilege, but alas me getting to Florida any time soon is very unlikely. Sometimes a Feynman video will pop up on YouTube when I'm exploring it at night and I'll click on it. Many times he's over my head, but playing the video over helps out. I figure sitting in one of your lectures would have the same impact, but no rewind, LOL! I've taken the liberty of exploring some of your work online, which you put up links to, and I wish I was 50 years younger to take more advantage of it.

I teach about that O-ring example every semester. Our former university president was on the disaster investigation team that testified before Congress.

That situation was entirely preventable. There is a Discovery Channel documentary on that disaster that was accurate and fairly complete, but I know more of the story.

The Morton Thiokol engineers tried to call off the launch because they knew that the coefficient of thermal expansion was high enough that the O-ring would shrink too much. The temperature that morning was an all-time record cold in recorded Titusville, Florida history of 18 degrees Fahrenheit. We just had our coldest temp since then was about a month ago, and quite a few plants are going to be replaced this March.

Way back when I was still working for a large corporation job postings with "diverse candidates welcome" always meant white male need not apply. Maybe Pete Hegseth will make a difference by throwing DEI into the trash can of history.

For sure, but it doesn't even have to be cryogenic cold. Some time back I read a biography on Richard Feynman (title: "Genius" as I recall) and he determined the Challenger disaster was caused by an O-ring that cracked due to the extreme cold snap the launch pad and rocket suffered just before launch. Choosing the right materials is crucial.

NASA? Call it BASA - Bureaucrats in Space. What have they done in the past 30 years and $100's of Billions but put a telescope in space?

DEI is their priority, not space exploration. Russia spends 1/10 the money but shuttles the US astronauts to the US space station while NASA made a telescope..

Same deal at the Pentagon. Creative people like me are not considered for contracts, all "set-aside" for others bearing the preferred physical characteristics.

Wernher Von Braun and his team wrote the systems book on the Saturn V project . It would pay NASA to do a deep review on how that team got the Saturn V stack to the Moon in 8 years.

Wow, that brings back memories. Inhibited Red Fuming Nitric Acid (IRFNA) is the one we used as an oxidizer for rockets.  UDMH was dangerous stuff too. One of our people got messed up in the brain from it.  He went into a grocery store and filled a cart beyond full of laundry detergent and kept going until the police took him a hospital. And I remember a hypergolic that our fire department pored out of a bottle, it ignited immediately with contact to the air.  It was like a bottle of fire.

IRFNA and UDMH kept me out of the infantrty. I got drafted and in a secure class in advaced infantry training the instructor got cocky and asked the class if anyone knew what type of fuel the Army Lance Missile used. I raised my hand, explained it to the class, then got picked up by the MP's on the way out of class. It was secret data back then and they wanted to know where I got that info. Fortunately it was a secured class, I got debriefed. I proceed to OCS and got assigned to Artillery OCS.

O2 and high explosives are like chemical relativity. Outside people's physical experience.

Gotta check out the video...

Yes, all on the right track. A mix of a hydrocarbon base (the dirtyand probably oily rat), and LOX (liquid oxygen) produces a very unstable substance similar to nitroglycerin. Any ignition source, even a physical shock can set it off. Most of the rats in the areaa were probwly coated in oil and other contaminates from crawling arund on outdoor test stands etc.

Anoither incudent with LOX occured when a LOX Truck delivery driver knocked a verty large open end wrench off the fender of his truck. Apparently there was a slight leak dripping from somewhere where the wrench must have hit the asphault. Boom, we never found the driver and only pieces of the truck. Extremely shock sensitive. They replaced all the truck unloading pads with concrete, and it got cleaned regularly. I found this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY_BM...

Doesn't take much energy to overcome the barrier with with pure O2. Probably just the thing hitting the wall, and a little event right there, spreading immediately. I'm just assuming based on Snezzy's example. Maybe there was oil on the wall or the rat, or some left over, poorly cleaned hypergolic's

I thought about that but I was wondering what the ignition source possibilities were.

I wonder why John Drury Clark didn't include that rat story in his famous book, "Ignition!"

Rocket science is inherently exciting, even if nothing goes wrong. Things sometimes DO go wrong, as we all know. The Soviet fuel choice of the hypergolic combination of red fuming nitric acid (RFNA) and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) contributed to the dreadful catastrophe at Baikonur in 1960.

Combustible carbon-compounds in the rat and oxygen

Trying to wrap my 80+ year old brain around what contributed to initiate the explosion. Please Illuminate me before I wear it out.

In the early 60's I worked at the Santa Susan Mountain test facility for Rocketdyne.  At lunch one day someone caught a rat and dipped it in liquid nitrogen, freezing it almost instantly.  They then threw the rat against a wall, and it just completely shattered like it was made of crystal.  The practice continued for a while, until someone at Rocketdyne's facility at Edwards AF Base in the desert did the same thing.  The problem was that they dipped their rat into liquid oxygen.  When thrown against the wall of a building, it blew a hole in the wall "big enough to drive a Mac Truck through".  The practice ceased right then and there.  Experience is still the best teacher (except of course, in politics).

Yah, it makes the vehicle lighter. (that's was intenend to be a joke). But in actuallity it is also true.

As I wrote above, weight shouldn't be the only consideration.

Weight