Failed Launches in "The Right Stuff": - Titan I B-5 (8/14/59) on pad - Thor 107 (10/3/57) into pad - Juno AM-16 (7/16/59) above pad - Mercury-Atlas MA-1 (4/3/61) during ascent - Titan I-J (7/1/60) out of control - Atlas 3B (7/19/58) out of control - Atlas 100D (5/8/62) during ascent - Mercury-Redstone 1 (11/21/60) parachute pops out - THE END The date they put on the first launch (7/29/60) is for a fictional launch.
Thanks. Is there a list of causes for these failures? Especially ones that fell back to the pad, I'd like to know how the rockets lost their TWR like that.
The 4th one was actually Mercury-Atlas MA-3(4/25/61), as MA-1 did not have the escape tower which was seen dragging the Mercury capsule off the Atlas rocket right before it exploded(which was exactly what happened with the MA-3 flight). Plus there still hasn't been footage of how MA-1 demised till this day AFAIK due to the bad weather obscuring the sighting of the vehicle that day.
Really one of my favorite movies. This sequence added some levity to a depressing situation -- the Soviets had already launched a man into space (if I have my timeline right) and the Mercury astronauts (portrayed here by Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid, and others) were getting anxious about being killed.
That actually happened, but not exactly how it was portrayed in the movie. A Mercury-Redstone test shot was to be fired from the Cape in the early 1960s. The main rocket did not fire, but the launch escape system tower did, leaving the spacecraft and booster behind. Then the parachute got ejected, just like the cork popping. Fortunately, the rocket didn't get dragged off the pad by the deployed chute.
I remember watching this in in 7th grade shop class and everyone but me kept laughing at the failed launches. Then the pop came and the whole class, including myself, rolled in laughter
The MR-1 "pop" failure was also known as the "3 inch flight". The Redstone engine ignited, but at that moment a power plug (called a tail plug) dropped off just a bit early and caused power disruptions. The rockets on board system thought "I'm done with my job, shut down" and settled back on the pad after lifting off 3 inches. At this point, the escape tower should have fired and pulled the (unmanned) capsules away to safety. But for this to work the system needed to sense weightlessness. But it sensed an accerlation of 9.8 m/s²(becasue it was on the ground sensing gravity) . But it also sensed that the rocket was off. This told it to jettison the escape tower. Then the barometric sensors saw that they were below 10k feet, deploy the chute.
@@technowarriorstv VHS = Video Home System. Video cassettes, which were the main ways of watching pre-recorded media, including movies, at home. They first emerged in the late-1970s, before becoming more affordable and thus more common in the 1980s and 1990s. Then DVDs arrived in the late-1990s, which in turn overtook VHS by the mid-2000s. After that, VHS soon started to disappear. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS
They didn't do what is shown in the video very often unless it was intended. Contrary to popular belief, getting enough thrust for lift-off is easy, it is getting where you want to go, staging correctly, avoiding things like fuel spinning around in the tank and avoiding the exhaust, controlling the angle of the rocket, etc that are tough.
@abemotorsports It was the Cold War and money was of no issue. Rest assured, the Soviets had their share of rocket failures as well, it's just they're not as public as U.S. failures. Most of the clips in the above video actually had nothing to do with NASA, but Air Force etc.
It's a movie, people. The one guy doing the launches, the press going crazy, the camera panning showing the astronauts present at each launch...it's all for dramatic effect, not so much for realism.
"Based on a true story" means almost nothing, as any fan of the horror genre can tell you. And it would be more correct to say that it's a movie made from a script that was adapted from a book that is _loosely_ based on real life events. There really were men named Alan Shepard and John Glenn, and they really did go to space, but beyond that, it's a work of fiction.
And that's not to say it's a bad movie, either. It's a great movie, and a great tribute to a bygone age. It's just not a documentary, nor is it trying to be one.
The astronauts were just Spam in a Can. Monkeys could literally do the job. The reason is the higher performance the vehicle, the more dependent it is on automation. And not only could Chuck Yeager not teach the astronauts, he was untrainable himself-probably because of his lack of formal education. The NF-104 was a good example. It was a very high performance aircraft that had to be flown at a very precise profile in order to get the performance out of it. It had a flight director system similar to what the Shuttle and most high performance aircraft have today… and just like a monkey, all you have to do is match the symbols up. In most planes you can connect an autopilot to follow a flight director and have it do it itself. But not Chuck. He was still flying a P-51 or an X-1 in his mind. He didn’t realize that pitching the aircraft too fast or not pitching it to the right attitude early enough for the zoom climb was robbing him of performance. Not only did he not beat the Russians… but not even the “rookies“ in the same program who could follow instructions.
Just offhand, I’d say the mission controller who pressed the button for each failed launch headed for the nearest barroom and got completely smashed and trashed on hard liquor. The poor man spent the rest of his years in an alcoholic ward.
Caleb Hone I felt bad for him lol. He always looked so excited to launch the rockets and expected each to work. Instead, this happened. 🙁 but they finally got it right.
They cast that part perfectly. You really believe he is the steely eyed missle man, which makes his repeated disappointment and chagrin all the more entertaining.
It was the Chinese who paid the biggest price for their space failures...in 1997 their Long March rocket came crashing to earth just seconds after launch, tragically it blew up in a village near the launch site, killing perhaps over 500 people, even though the Chinese state media reported just 57 casualties. The Chinese government blamed the rocket's failure on "an unexpected gust of wind."
This is going to sound grim but Christa McAuliffe most probably saw this in a theatre in 1983 before applying for the 1985 Teacher in Space mission aboard Challenger in 1986.
OK, but what do these initial woes with rockets at the dawn of the space age have to do with something that happened more than 20 years later and after the Shuttle was already pretty established?
@ugowar excellent, well I'm glad it wasn't a major issue back then , like it is now with cutting off personal, high costs and less expeditions to the space or science !! anyways love your comment!!
they where no computer aided design only the mind pencil and a slide/calculator (dont know the real name for it) and trail and error back then now a days you can crash test directly in the computer i think the Apollo project is fantastic in a enginering way soory for my english i danish :)
is not the button but the 56.000.000.000.000.000 other things there can go wrong and i think they had a automated system of some sort so knowbody had too push any thing
2:04 First time I saw the movie as a kid 25 years ago, I wondered WTH ? why is the rocket popping like a champagne bottle ? I thought it was a joke ! And then I heard of this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-Redstone_1 I laughed so hard, it is really one of the most absurd launch failures of all times (with Ariane Flight 36, the rocket that was killed by a CLOTH)
At 1:31, what kind of missile/rocket is this? It almost looks like a Saturn series but not quite. I pulled out a couple of books and just can't seem to figure out what type it was, or what the circumstances were with this specific explosion. Does anyone know more?
the second rocket, yeah i dont remember what its called, Im 98.786% sure that there are no more of those anywhere in the world. none are in aerospace muesems that i've checked and i cant even find the rocket on any list of rockets or charts or anything like that. oviously a huge fail!
In 1985 dollars, the Atlast LV-3B rocket used in Project Mercy cost 14.2 million dollars per unit. In today's money, that would be about 20 million dollars.
Failed Launches in "The Right Stuff":
- Titan I B-5 (8/14/59) on pad
- Thor 107 (10/3/57) into pad
- Juno AM-16 (7/16/59) above pad
- Mercury-Atlas MA-1 (4/3/61) during ascent
- Titan I-J (7/1/60) out of control
- Atlas 3B (7/19/58) out of control
- Atlas 100D (5/8/62) during ascent
- Mercury-Redstone 1 (11/21/60) parachute pops out
- THE END
The date they put on the first launch (7/29/60) is for a fictional launch.
Thanks. Is there a list of causes for these failures? Especially ones that fell back to the pad, I'd like to know how the rockets lost their TWR like that.
@@slabgizor1176 some where self destructs when losing control.
I was wondering. Many thanks!
That wasnt mercury, it was a giant bottle of champaign! JK.
The 4th one was actually Mercury-Atlas MA-3(4/25/61), as MA-1 did not have the escape tower which was seen dragging the Mercury capsule off the Atlas rocket right before it exploded(which was exactly what happened with the MA-3 flight). Plus there still hasn't been footage of how MA-1 demised till this day AFAIK due to the bad weather obscuring the sighting of the vehicle that day.
This makes my KSP launches look like the Apollo program.
JEEEEEEEB!!!! *BOOM*
Really one of my favorite movies. This sequence added some levity to a depressing situation -- the Soviets had already launched a man into space (if I have my timeline right) and the Mercury astronauts (portrayed here by Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid, and others) were getting anxious about being killed.
The Mercury astronauts expected failures in the early testing. Its mentioned in the book.
The last one ALWAYS cracks me up! POP!
🍾
The last one:
Me: It's gonna be a big explosion!
Rocket: Lol nope *pops like a wine bottle*
That actually happened, but not exactly how it was portrayed in the movie. A Mercury-Redstone test shot was to be fired from the Cape in the early 1960s. The main rocket did not fire, but the launch escape system tower did, leaving the spacecraft and booster behind. Then the parachute got ejected, just like the cork popping. Fortunately, the rocket didn't get dragged off the pad by the deployed chute.
I remember watching this in in 7th grade shop class and everyone but me kept laughing at the failed launches. Then the pop came and the whole class, including myself, rolled in laughter
The MR-1 "pop" failure was also known as the "3 inch flight". The Redstone engine ignited, but at that moment a power plug (called a tail plug) dropped off just a bit early and caused power disruptions. The rockets on board system thought "I'm done with my job, shut down" and settled back on the pad after lifting off 3 inches.
At this point, the escape tower should have fired and pulled the (unmanned) capsules away to safety. But for this to work the system needed to sense weightlessness. But it sensed an accerlation of 9.8 m/s²(becasue it was on the ground sensing gravity) . But it also sensed that the rocket was off. This told it to jettison the escape tower.
Then the barometric sensors saw that they were below 10k feet, deploy the chute.
2:00 that’s what you get for not double-checking your staging!
Pop!🍾
Yeap like popping a cork. 😁😁😁😁
I remember being about ten years old and borrowing the two-part VHS of this movie from my grandma. I feel old.
the helll is a vhs
@@technowarriorstv
VHS = Video Home System. Video cassettes, which were the main ways of watching pre-recorded media, including movies, at home. They first emerged in the late-1970s, before becoming more affordable and thus more common in the 1980s and 1990s. Then DVDs arrived in the late-1990s, which in turn overtook VHS by the mid-2000s. After that, VHS soon started to disappear.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHS
@@johndoe6298 I feel depressingly old . . .
The last one was hilarious 😆
1:20 and 1:29 just kills me. Every time. Poor launch guy, for once he nailed the *liftoff*... ROTFL
I always love the last one.
3... 2... 1...0... KaBOOM
"sir, I think a kerbal sneaked in again"
"You're finally making progress - You've fired a dud"
- Enrico Fermi to weapons designer Ted Taylor after failed nuke test
Loved the movie, loved this sequence beyond belief! Thank you for sharing!
Atlas after Atlas. That's where Von Braun's Redstone came in handy for a safe trip for Shepard with MR-3. Basically a stretched V2.
A stretched V2 that misses London this time
Problem is they wanted a man in orbit. Not suborbital. At least he helped with the Saturn.
This movie is a testament to the American capability of blowing stuff up.
and keeping at it until it doesn't.
Reminds me of that time when I played "Moonbase" on my trusty Atari ST.
They didn't do what is shown in the video very often unless it was intended.
Contrary to popular belief, getting enough thrust for lift-off is easy, it is getting where you want to go, staging correctly, avoiding things like fuel spinning around in the tank and avoiding the exhaust, controlling the angle of the rocket, etc that are tough.
"staging correctly"
I doubt that messed up staging is a big issue for NASA
15 Redstones That’s the reason the last clip’s parachute popped out. Hey, it was the early days of NASA.
@abemotorsports It was the Cold War and money was of no issue. Rest assured, the Soviets had their share of rocket failures as well, it's just they're not as public as U.S. failures. Most of the clips in the above video actually had nothing to do with NASA, but Air Force etc.
It's a movie, people. The one guy doing the launches, the press going crazy, the camera panning showing the astronauts present at each launch...it's all for dramatic effect, not so much for realism.
Yeah, well, there's just one slight hiccup in that insight: It's Base on a True Story. All of it.
"Based on a true story" means almost nothing, as any fan of the horror genre can tell you.
And it would be more correct to say that it's a movie made from a script that was adapted from a book that is _loosely_ based on real life events.
There really were men named Alan Shepard and John Glenn, and they really did go to space, but beyond that, it's a work of fiction.
And that's not to say it's a bad movie, either. It's a great movie, and a great tribute to a bygone age.
It's just not a documentary, nor is it trying to be one.
Is it weird that this is my favorite part of the movie?
😁😁😁 So Hillarious... The "pop" scene😂😂😂!!!...
Yeager was good enough to train the astronauts but due to not having a college degree the "experts" didn't think he was qualified to be an astronaut!
The astronauts were just Spam in a Can. Monkeys could literally do the job.
The reason is the higher performance the vehicle, the more dependent it is on automation.
And not only could Chuck Yeager not teach the astronauts, he was untrainable himself-probably because of his lack of formal education.
The NF-104 was a good example. It was a very high performance aircraft that had to be flown at a very precise profile in order to get the performance out of it. It had a flight director system similar to what the Shuttle and most high performance aircraft have today… and just like a monkey, all you have to do is match the symbols up. In most planes you can connect an autopilot to follow a flight director and have it do it itself.
But not Chuck. He was still flying a P-51 or an X-1 in his mind. He didn’t realize that pitching the aircraft too fast or not pitching it to the right attitude early enough for the zoom climb was robbing him of performance. Not only did he not beat the Russians… but not even the “rookies“ in the same program who could follow instructions.
@@calvinnickel9995he was to old
2:04 that sound
Just offhand, I’d say the mission controller who pressed the button for each failed launch headed for the nearest barroom and got completely smashed and trashed on hard liquor. The poor man spent the rest of his years in an alcoholic ward.
The last one had me rolling
The last one at 2:00 - pop! 😂
Everyone finds that funny
My favorite. My history professor showed the class this clip and it was just so perfectly timed!
That was actually a Mercury-Redstone, not an Atlas:
ua-cam.com/video/7O4V7JfeTSU/v-deo.html
I blame the guy pressing the launch button
Caleb Hone I felt bad for him lol. He always looked so excited to launch the rockets and expected each to work. Instead, this happened. 🙁 but they finally got it right.
I love how clunky those buttons were. So retro.
@@kbanghart That was cutting edge in the '60s.
They cast that part perfectly. You really believe he is the steely eyed missle man, which makes his repeated disappointment and chagrin all the more entertaining.
RIP Challenger & Columbia
And Apollo 1
2:00 is the funniest
Pop!🍾
2:04 Pop…like a champagne bottle!!
Me on the toilet after eating from Tacobell: 0:09
The premature ejaculation featured at the end of this depressing sequence of failures…Apt punctuation!
It was the Chinese who paid the biggest price for their space failures...in 1997 their Long March rocket came crashing to earth just seconds after launch, tragically it blew up in a village near the launch site, killing perhaps over 500 people, even though the Chinese state media reported just 57 casualties. The Chinese government blamed the rocket's failure on "an unexpected gust of wind."
This is going to sound grim but Christa McAuliffe most probably saw this in a theatre in 1983 before applying for the 1985 Teacher in Space mission aboard Challenger in 1986.
OK, but what do these initial woes with rockets at the dawn of the space age have to do with something that happened more than 20 years later and after the Shuttle was already pretty established?
What makes you think that Christa actually watched "The Right Stuff" before she sent in her application for the "Teacher In Space Project?"
Ok, who was recording my Kerbal Space Program launches? which one of you was it?
@ugowar excellent, well I'm glad it wasn't a major issue back then , like it is now with cutting off personal, high costs and less expeditions to the space or science !! anyways love your comment!!
Real men didn’t cheer when the rocket failed.
"vapor in feedlines, shut down"
1:23 DENIED!
they where no computer aided design only the mind pencil and a slide/calculator (dont know the real name for it) and trail and error back then
now a days you can crash test directly in the computer
i think the Apollo project is fantastic in a enginering way
soory for my english i danish :)
4/20/2023 Space X had another "kinetic dissembly". Ad aspera, per aspera....
Back to the ol' drawing board! 🙄🤗🤔
Just another day in Kerbal Space Program.
is not the button but the 56.000.000.000.000.000 other things there can go wrong
and i think they had a automated system of some sort so knowbody had too push any thing
2:04 First time I saw the movie as a kid 25 years ago, I wondered WTH ? why is the rocket popping like a champagne bottle ? I thought it was a joke ! And then I heard of this en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-Redstone_1
I laughed so hard, it is really one of the most absurd launch failures of all times (with Ariane Flight 36, the rocket that was killed by a CLOTH)
i like the last one. gotta ask yourself: what idiot wired the parachute to the ignition?!
That guy has a horrific smile.
I was 1 when this came out lol
back to the drawing board.
* ques benny hill music up to this video *
2:00 Jeb, did you check your staging?
At 1:31, what kind of missile/rocket is this? It almost looks like a Saturn series but not quite. I pulled out a couple of books and just can't seem to figure out what type it was, or what the circumstances were with this specific explosion. Does anyone know more?
Titan I-J (7/1/60).
I wish someone would post the "panic in the program" scene. I have the DVD but I do not know how to do it.
True. It looks cool, though.
Oh NASA,such noobs,everyone knows that if something is not working,just add more boosters
the second rocket, yeah i dont remember what its called, Im 98.786% sure that there are no more of those anywhere in the world. none are in aerospace muesems that i've checked and i cant even find the rocket on any list of rockets or charts or anything like that. oviously a huge fail!
I was thinking old timey ragtime myself.
hehe... that was funny, at the end. :-)
Those rockets tests are pretty funny, but I wonder how much did NASA spent to every failed test?
the rocket top blow up like a champagne cork
Dis KSP in real life ?
TheMartieno Pretty much
watching this after SN11 lol
At that moment how many dollars cost 1 Rocket ?
In 1985 dollars, the Atlast LV-3B rocket used in Project Mercy cost 14.2 million dollars per unit. In today's money, that would be about 20 million dollars.
Oh god my sides
What, one guy couldn't hold a job at NASA?
*Check yo' stagin*
0:36 0:52 1:09 1:59
Those Kerbals look a lot like humans...D:
Kerbal Space program
1983
Pop!
And then they had to call a german (Von Braun) to get the job done.. as usual :D
Plop!