Rocket destroyed by lightning strike

"Andi Kleen" wrote in message
...
Never mind, I should have read the paper to the end. It's listed
in an appendix as "Atlas G in 1987. Struck by lightning 57s in flight."
Pretty bad luck, I bet the responsible people felt rather cheated.

Pretty stupid people, if you ask me. It was raining so hard at T-0 that the
rocket could barely be seen on TV. At times the pad was completely unseen.
As you said, a lightning bolt hit it, the flight control computer had its
navigation scrambled. It commanded the engines hard over to steer it where
it thought it needed to go, and the ship came apart from the stress, just
before Range Safety pushed the button.

Weather constraints were revised immediately after. Imagine that.

-Kim-

Kim Keller wrote:
Pretty stupid people, if you ask me. It was raining so hard at T-0 that the
rocket could barely be seen on TV. At times the pad was completely unseen.
As you said, a lightning bolt hit it, the flight control computer had its
navigation scrambled. It commanded the engines hard over to steer it where
it thought it needed to go, and the ship came apart from the stress, just
before Range Safety pushed the button.

Weather constraints were revised immediately after. Imagine that.


In that case, "lightning strike" certainly wasn't the *root* cause...

Sounds like they needed to make videos of the Apollo 12 launch mandatory
viewing...

--
Reed Snellenberger
GPG KeyID: 5A978843
rsnellenberger-at-houston.rr.com

Andi Kleen wrote:
Reed Snellenberger writes:

In that case, "lightning strike" certainly wasn't the *root* cause...


What was the root cause then?

-Andi

The decision to launch when weather conditions were as bad as they were...

--
Reed Snellenberger
GPG KeyID: 5A978843
rsnellenberger-at-houston.rr.com

"Andi Kleen" wrote in message
...
Reed Snellenberger writes:

In that case, "lightning strike" certainly wasn't the *root* cause...

What was the root cause then?

Failure to adequately assess meteorological conditions. That particular loss
led directly to the stringent, almost overbearing, weather rules in place
for launches from the Eastern and Western Test Ranges.

-Kim-

I recall that at the time the lightning rules were based on
E-field data from field mills (or some such), not on whether
it was raining or not. The data said "go", even though
a front was obviously rolling through at the time. So
they went. A friend there said he couldn't see anything,
but that he very much heard the "boom" when the rocket
broke up. It must have happened at fairly low altitude.

- Ed Kyle

It was AC-67, an Atlas G/Centaur launched 3/26/1987 from
Pad 36B with FLTSATCOM 6. It was the only Atlas launched
during 1987-88.

- Ed Kyle

Sorry. I should have said "only Atlas Centaur launched
during 1987-88".

- Ed Kyle