Flight
After the shortest checkout time of any rocket at 54 days, SA-4 went on to experience the longest series of holds of any mission at 120 minutes. The SA-4 launch would be the final single-stage flight.
The rocket operated perfectly through the first 100 seconds of the flight, when the Number 5 engine shut off as planned. The rocket then continued to operate properly, the propellant system rerouting the fuel to the other engines. The Number 5 engine didn't disintegrate because of heat caused by the lack of cooling propellant as some had predicted. This was an important test proving an important feature of the clustered engine design.
The rocket reached a maximum height of 129 km and a peak velocity of 5906 km per hour. At this stage it also fired retrorockets that would be used on later missions to separate the rocket stages. On SA-4 the stages weren't designed to separate but tested the retrorockets to make sure they would fire.
Read more about this topic: Saturn I SA-4
Famous quotes containing the word flight:
“What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness! Young birds on their first flight are hardly so hovered around.”
—Georges Bernanos (1888–1948)