On Oct 22, 2020, at 10:58 AM, Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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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