1/24 Apollo/Saturn V (enlarged 1/48 Greelt et al version)

[JohnGay]

That TRULY IMPRESSIVE!!!!!
An AMAZING build and AWESOME way to display it AND Teach a new generation to AIM HIGH!!!

[spacecraftcreator]

Well done.....take pride in what you have accomplished and hope that the public who viewed it learned from your efforts..I appreciate what you have done and say thank you from an educator and fellow public exhibitor....

Bob

[mbauer]

Wow Kevin,

Outstanding! Looking forward to the next posts.

Are you taking a few days off, or jumping in to finish everything?

Kind of curious about the "not at home" comment. Have you found a permanent display for it?

Best regards,
Mike Bauer

[Revell-Fan]

Absolutely amazing! I love it!

[Algebraist]

Dear

eatcrow2, Nando, Dwyane, rifleman, Helmut, Doug, Elliott, Fred, Becky, David, Phantomcruiser, rkelterer, John, Bob, Mike and Revell-Fan

Glad you enjoyed it and thank you for all your very generous comments

Yes Elliott, my wife is VERY please to have her house back!

Regards

Kevin

[Algebraist]

Originally Posted by rickstef

Kevin,

As for the video, the best method would be to upload it to a service like Youtube or Vimeo, Vimeo would be better, as there is little to no compression of the file size, with Youtube there is.

Rick

Thanks for the advice Rick, much appreciated. Congratulations on gaining your masters! Well done and good luck for the future with it.

Regards

Kevin

[Algebraist]

Originally Posted by mbauer

Wow Kevin,

Outstanding! Looking forward to the next posts.

Are you taking a few days off, or jumping in to finish everything?

Kind of curious about the "not at home" comment. Have you found a permanent display for it?

Best regards,
Mike Bauer

Hi Mike.

I was really really tired after the show so took some holiday and a break from paper modelling. I think I will take it steady with the completion of the model.

The model is currently sitting in my office at work (will try to remember to take a picture). Currently the "future" for the model is not certain. However a number of places have expressed interest so my hope is it will en up somewhere it will be enjoyed by lots of people. Will let people know what the outcome is when I know more.

Regards

Kevin

[Algebraist]

Dear all

The state of the 1/24 and 1/48 models is that they are sitting in my office at work at the moment. Here is a photo



My plan is to make the remaining parts at home and then attach them to the model at my office.

When complete I think I have found a fitting way to take a final photo.

Also if anyone is interested I have (finally) managed to upload the photos of the display to the "Gallery" (however the order is somewhat chaotic)

Regards

Kevin

[Algebraist]

Dear all

Some of you have asked if I could tell you about the "Rocket to the Moon" talk I gave during the festival where the rocket was on display or video the talk.

Because of what happened and after some thought I am going to try and give a "sort of version" of the talk for anyone interested.

To set the scene it was in a very nice lecture theatre which holds 450 people and has a great two storey screen (it has an IMAX feel to it) and no that is not me in the photos



Normally before giving a public show to a large audience I due a "secret" dry run however for this talk I had not managed to do that. Also I have no real idea as to the level of interest from the public in this topic and wonder if anyone will come.

15 mins before start time "anticipatory music" starts playing and there is a "quiz" projected (just to keep people entertained whilst everyone arrives) of pictures of different fictional spacecraft and a question about the picture.


The theatre fills up to capacity and I estimate about 1/3 of the audience is children, 1/3 adults born after the moon landings and 1/3 people who lived through the moon landings. (I am pleased as it was billed as a show for all ages and glad of the spread of interest).

The quiz finishes the safety announcements are made and I am introduced. It is time...

[Algebraist]

Hello and welcome to "Rocket to the Moon". In the 1960's an impossible dream happened when mankind went to the moon. I was lucky enough to grow up at that time and was the perfect age to be inspired by it.

I want to take you on a journey and we are going to go to the moon and because this is a science festival show we are going to see some of the maths that made it possible. The usual story of the rocket to the moon is fascinating but very complex involving many aspects of the world including politics, ideology, money, science, tragedy and success and would take many many talks. But that is not the journey I am talking about. I want to take you on an emotional journey and hopefully try and let you feel what it was like to live through those times

So it is time to start our journey
(lecture theatre lights go down into total blackness and anticipatory music)



(Now watch the video from 3.11 to 3.21)



So why did President Kennedy set this goal of landing on the moon by the end of the decade? To understand this we need to go back in time even more. After the end of the second world war in 1945 two nuclear superpower nations dominated the world. The United States and the Soviet Union. The United States was the leader and protector of "The West" and represented freedom and liberty for the peoples of the world whereas the Soviet Union was "a communist" oppressive regime and was a threat to freedom and liberty and a danger to the world (at least that was the rhetoric of "the West"). And then one day the world changed forever



(now watch the video)



We learn that this is called "Sputnik" and was the first ever man made satellite to orbit the earth. So now is a good idea to explain an orbit



So when you throw any object (like a ball) the earths gravity is pulling it towards the ground and it has to follow a path called a parabola and are like the pictures above. This path can be described exactly using mathematics (usually studied when you are about 18 yrs old). The same is true even if you throw the ball horizontally (it is just that the ball never goes up, it only goes down. So now imagine you are on top of mount Everest and you throw a ball horizontally. As soon as you let go gravity starts pulling the ball down, it follows the path of a parabola and eventually it hits the ground. If you threw it faster it would travel further before it hit the ground. Now the world is round, so what if you thew the ball so fast that by the time gravity had pulled the ball down by 1000 metres the ball had go out so far that the earths surface had curved down by 1000 metres? Then the ball would still be at the same height above the earths surface as when you let go of it. So it hasn't fallen in height. Then if the ball does not slow down the same will be true the the next 1000 metres and so on. So eventually the ball will right round the earth and you will be able to catch it. Using maths you can work out the sped needed to throw the ball and it is about 17000 mph. (That's fast. Commercial jet 500 mph, bullet from a gun 1700 mph, fastest spy plan 2200 mph). Actually if you did throw a ball that fast from the top of Everest it would still hit the ground because the air up their (even though there is not much of it) would slow the ball down. However if you were 100 miles or more above the surface of the earth and you threw your ball horizontally at 17000 mph, there is so little atmosphere up there it would cirle the earth. That is an orbit

Back to our story. We now learn the significance of Sputnik, in that you could replace Sputnik with a nuclear warhead. Another disconcerting issue with this event is it goes against the "West is superior to the Soviet Union" which was very much the message of the time. So the United States responds it will launch it's first satellite, Vanguard TV3. Moreover as the then president of the United Sates points out (Dwight D. Eisenhower) it would not be done in secrecy but rather in freedom before the worlds press



Now watch the newsreel footage of the the launch



It was humiliation for the governing powers of the United States. The press around the world and in the United States did not hold back



There was "Oopsnik", "Stayputnik", "Dudnik" and "Kaputnik".

Things just kept getting worse (from the United States point of view) in the "Space Race"



During this period the Soviet Union achieved the following "firsts"



It is clear the next step is who will get the first human into space.
By now John F Kennedy has won the United States presidential election (defeating Richard M. Nixon, a name we shall meet again) and wants a victory over the Soviet Union in the space race.



The United States tests the rocket and spacecraft it hopes will in the near future put the first human into space. However in this test flight there is no human only a dummy.

Here is what happened

(Now watch the video)



The problems were fixed and a date of 5th May 1961 was fixed for what was hoped to be the first human in space. The redstone rocket was not powerful enough to get a manned spacecraft into orbit but it could get a manned spacecraft into a parabolic flight of about 125 miles high which is in space.


12th April 1961, just 3 weeks before the United States was to try to launch the the first person into space

(Think Soviet music like in Hunt for Red October to the next video)

(Now watch the video)



On April 12th 1961, Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union got up, had his breakfast, climbed into his Vostok spacecraft, launched into space, did one orbit of the earth, landed safely and was back in time for lunch having just become the first human into space.

Overnight he became the most famous person on the planet and was a sensation wherever he visited both inside and outside the Soviet Union



It was a tremendous achievement for the scientists who worked on the programme. In particular the chief designer Sergei Korolev, who the Soviet Union valued so highly and feared might be assassinated had his identity kept top secret and was only known as "Chief Designer".

It is also a huge propaganda boost for the political powers of the Soviet Union in the ever increasing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union

Now is a good time to explain how a rocket engine works.

So imagine you are on a rowing boat in the middle on a lake and the boat and the water are perfectly still. In the boat you have only lots and lots of ping pong balls. if you were to take on of the balls and throw it horizontally over the back of the boat you would find that the boat would (very slowly) move forward. This is because the universe things "don't want to move" so if you push against something, it pushes back against you (this is called Newton's second law). So as you throw the ball you are basically pushing against it so it is pushing against you. So that "push" by the ball moves you and since you are "joined" to the boat is pushing the boat and since there is almost no friction between the boat and the water the boat moves in that direction. So how fast will you move? Well there is a mathematical formula called "conservation of momentum" which in this case says the number you get from multiplying the "amount of ball" (mass of ball) by how fast you throw it must equal the amount of boat and everything in it (including you) and how fast that all moves. So small ball fast speed equates to big heavy "boat" and slow speed. But now throw a second ball whilst you are moving and then you will get a bit quicker and so on. Now think about throwing billions and billions of balls one after another then your boat will reach great speed.

So what about a rocket engine?



So for some chemical reactions one of the side effects is the molecules get all excited and whizz about in all directions. If you do one of these reactions inside a sphere them there are molecules (just like balls) constantly hitting the inside of the sphere in equal amounts at all parts. So the sphere is being "punched from the inside" in all directions by equal amounts, so it does not move. Now if the was a small hole in the sphere then all the molecules that reach the hole just carry on out of the sphere, so the sphere is not being pushed in that direction. However directly opposite the hole the molecules are still pushing the sphere in that direction so the sphere moves in that direction (it is being punched in that direction). It is this principle that makes a balloon "fly" when you let go of the end.

A good chemical reaction to give excited molecules is "burning" (oxidation). On earth there is a ready supply of oxygen in the atmosphere so your vehicle only has to carry the other chemical (the "fuel") but in the vacuum of space there is no supply of oxygen so you need to carry both the "fuel" and your source of oxygen (the "oxidizer").

So just like in the boat and ping pong balls, the faster you can make the molecules go out of the back of your rocket engine the faster your rocket will go (because of "conservation of momentum"). Well I'm sure you have all squirted someone/something with water from a hose pipe and you get a "longer" squirt by making the outlet of the hose smaller with your thumb. Closing down the hole increases the speed of the water. The smaller the hole the faster it comes out. So you do the same with a rocket engine. You narrow the exit route of the gases from the combustion chamber to speed it up. But hang on, rocket engine bells get wider, surely that then slows everything down again (like opening the hole on the hose pipe? This is where the power of mathematics comes in. When you describe the problem using maths you find that the exit speed depends also on the speed of sound and you can see that when a fluid/gas travels faster than the speed of sound to make it go quicker you WIDEN the "hole" (very counter intuitive). So that is why rocket engines narrow first (to get up to the speed of sound for the exit molecules and then widen (at the "throat") to make them go super and hyper sonic. The staggering thing to remember is your rocket, no matter how massive, is being punch up into space to an unbelievable speed by an unimaginable numbers of incredibly tiny molecules hitting it.

So back to our story.

It is yet another blow for the United States in the space race. So President Kennedy asks the then Vice President (Lyndon B Johnson) to come up with something in the space race that will give the United States time to catch up and overtake the Soviet Union and win.



(Now watch the video)



The launch of Alan Shepard in his Mercury spacecraft "Freedom 7" on a Redstone rocket is a success as he becomes the first American into space.

It is a great achievement for all the scientists who have worked on the project. However politically it is not the victory that was sought. Yet again the United States had been beaten by the Soviet Union and was currently unable to match them (the United States still is yet to put a person into orbit) since Alan Shepard's flight was sub orbital.



Shortly after Alan Shepard's flight, against a backdrop of ever increasing tension in the world, Vice President Lyndon Johnson told President Kennedy that landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade was the only realistic goal in the space race that the United States could possibly beat the Soviet Union.

On the 25th May 1961 President Kennedy makes the announcement that the United States intends to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, which was the speech we saw at the start of this talk.

To be continued

Kevin