Debugging a Live Saturn V

http://www.zamiang.com/posts/2013/10/13/red-team/

by dblock • 13 years ago

276 33 13 years ago

zamiang.com

ljoshua• 13 years ago

Awesome. I wish/don't wish that my debugging was that exciting.

edge17• 13 years ago

i think those situations find you, not the other way around :)

kabdib• 13 years ago

Signing off on the paperwork and /then/ getting out of there.

So NASA :-)

ISL• 13 years ago

Careful adherence to a well-vetted plan is a good way to get to the moon and back.

wtracy• 13 years ago

I'd rather not drive a mile and a half away and then find out I missed something on the checklist and have to go back.

brudgers2• 13 years ago

And that's what is meant by"Steely Eyed Missile Man."

erbo• 13 years ago

We know that astronauts frequently have had to be badasses, and even flight controllers have had to be badasses (e.g. John Aaron, Apollo 12, "SCE to AUX"), but this is proof positive that even the guys that fix the bugs in the rockets sometimes have to be badasses, too.

krisgee2• 13 years ago

Gene Crantz is another certified badass flight controller, I highly recommend his book "Failure is not an Option" which is all about his time in the American space program (which stretches from Mercury all the way to the Space Shuttle).

geetee• 13 years ago

Amazing story and many condolences. I hope he was able to personally tell you some of these stories before he passed on.

larrydag• 13 years ago

What a great legacy to share. Thanks for sharing.

shospes• 13 years ago

Incredible story, unfortunately debugging is not that exiting any more..

mikeash• 13 years ago

Since I spend a great deal of my time debugging (I would really say that I spend all of my time debugging), I would say it's a good thing that it's not that exciting.

Arjuna2• 13 years ago

For those that are not familiar, the Saturn V was equipped with 5 (yes, you read that right)... five F-1 rocket engines. Each engine produced an absolutely staggering 1,500,000 pounds of thrust; that's a total of 7,500,000 pounds of thrust!

Can you imagine being tucked into the small, cramped Command Module, sitting on top of this power at lift-off?

The whole thing, the technology, the sound, the people coming together to make it happen... it's soul-stirring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-cv_JJOxGI

jlgreco3• 13 years ago

A fun wikipedia page:

    18.3 GW – tech: peak electrical power generation of the Three Gorges Dam, the world's
                    largest hydroelectric power plant of any type.
    ...
    190 GW – tech: average power consumption of the first stage of the Saturn V rocket

After that, there are a few lasers that can fire for millionths of a second, but no proper man-made machines. Excluding those experimental lasers, the Saturn V remains the most powerful machine ever made. I have heard that stated a lot, but the truth behind that statement never really sunk in for me before.

Edit: whoops, forgot the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)

sho_hn• 13 years ago

Can you explain what "power consumption" refers to in this context? The power released by the fuel to achieve the thrust, taking efficiency into account? Or how is it calculated?

ericd2• 13 years ago

The series that that clip is from ("When We Left Earth") is soul stirring throughout. It's one of the most inspirational things I've ever seen. And it's on Netflix! They should really show it in schools, it's incredible.

Link: http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/When_We_Left_Earth_The_NAS...

AYBABTME• 13 years ago

And indeed, Netflix Canada doesn't have it. =(

krisgee2• 13 years ago

I'm not even American and I feel a bit patriotic about that shot of the American flag rising up through the condensation and falling ice.

ajtaylor• 13 years ago

That's going on my to-watch list tonight. Thanks for the pointer.

brudgers2• 13 years ago

If you want to see a Saturn V, this is the place:

http://rocketcenter.com/mu/exhibits

And it is nowhere near the space nerdiest item on display. Von Braun lived in Huntsville, and Redstone Arsenal is where lots of the grunt work was done to put men on the moon.

pdkl95• 13 years ago

This very-slow-motion footage of the Saturn V taking off is one of the more impressive pieces of footage I've ever seen. The entire launch process is described in detail, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPW7ZqtW5U4

Watching the entire launchpad engulfed in a fireball is crazy enough. Watching that fireball reverse direction and get /sucked/ down the exhaust hole as the F-1 engines quickly ramp up to that incredible 1.5M lb of thrust is, for me, up there with the photos of Sandia's Z-Machine as evidence that the Cool Sci-Fi Future has indeed arrived.

carterac2• 13 years ago

The author humbly failed to mention that late last night he accomplished quite an extraordinary just-in-time feat himself:

Today Artsy launched its live auction platform with TWO x TWO, a charity to benefit AIDS research: http://artsy.net/feature/two-x-two

BrainInAJar• 13 years ago

Making a website is so amazingly far away from the engineering feat of the Saturn V that it's insulting to the Saturn V engineers to make the comparison.

carterac2• 13 years ago

Was referring to the general idea of last-minute fixing mentioned at the beginning of the post: "We all have stories, as engineers, of fixing some crazy thing at the last minute right before the demo goes up."

bigiain• 13 years ago

Somehow my occasional entry into the command line on a production server, opening up vi, and snapping a new configuration tweak in place and testing it – it doesn't seem quite so brave or adventurous any more…

AustinLin• 13 years ago

Beautiful story.

andyjohnson0• 13 years ago

A fascinating story. Although the situation was very different, it reminded me of the aborted launch of Mercury Redstone 1:

"...following a normal countdown, the Mercury-Redstone's engine ignited on schedule at 9:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (14:00 GMT). However, the engine shut down immediately after lift-off from the launch pad. The rocket only rose about 4 inches (10 cm) before settling back onto the pad. It wobbled slightly, but stayed upright and did not explode. An odd series of events then took place.

Immediately after the Redstone's engine shut down, the Mercury capsule's escape rocket jettisoned itself, leaving the capsule attached to the Redstone booster. The escape rocket rose to an altitude of 4,000 feet (1,200 m) and landed about 400 yards (370 m) away. Three seconds after the escape rocket fired, the capsule deployed its drogue parachute; it then deployed the main and reserve parachutes, ejecting the radio antenna fairing in the process.

In the end, all that had been launched was the escape rocket. Meanwhile, a fully fueled, slightly wrinkled Redstone and its Mercury capsule sat on the launch pad, both with full batteries and live pyrotechnics. Among these pyrotechnics were the capsule's retrorockets and the Redstone's self-destruct system, which was still active. Furthermore, the capsule's main and reserve parachutes were hanging down the side of the rocket, threatening to tip it over if they caught enough wind..." [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury-Redstone_1

Debugging a Live Saturn V

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