[AR] Re: Black Arrow (was Re: Hypothetical Lox cooling)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2020 12:58:17 -0400 (EDT)
On Thu, 22 Oct 2020, Ben Brockert wrote:
The one upside of the abrupt cancellation is that the final complete
rocket is hanging in a museum. I went to see it last year. The lighting
is unfortunately terrible...
Yeah, it's a pity they insisted on hanging it from the ceiling of a
dimly-lit room. See attached view of the first and second stages, taken
about five years ago. (They also have a dummy third-stage motor and a
mockup of the Prospero satellite, but I didn't have quite the camera FOV
to get them all in with reasonable detail -- you can just see the start of
the third-stage nozzle at the top.) The view was much better back in the
1990s when they had it down at floor level and reasonably lit, but that
was before I had a digital camera.
but it's nice to have a complete artifact that wasn't left outside for
fifty years.
And speaking of outside for fifty years :-), see the second attached for
what the first stage of the only orbital launch looks like now -- it was
at the Royal International Air Tattoo airshow last year.
The Black Arrow is also notable for being one of the only rocket
programs that was correctly numbered: they started serials at zero.
Vanguard also had a number 0 (a Viking carrying some Vanguard electronics,
as a flight test for them and a range/facilities pathfinder; no actual
Vanguard rocket stages involved). Although they wimped out -- they had a
separate numbering sequence for allegedly-operational launchers, after the
initial test-vehicle sequence, and they started those at 1.
Have there been any others?
Henry
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