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:
“In all her products, Nature only develops her simplest germs. One would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds. The hawk which now takes his flight over the top of the wood was at first, perchance, only a leaf which fluttered in its aisles. From rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to the loftier flight and clear carol of the bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Its shrill scream seems yet to linger in its throat, and the roar of the sea in its wings. There is the tyranny of Jove in its claws, and his wrath in the erectile feathers of the head and neck. It reminds me of the Argonautic expedition, and would inspire the dullest to take flight over Parnassus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When we are high and airy hundreds say
That if we hold that flight they’ll leave the place,
While those same hundreds mock another day
Because we have made our art of common things ...”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)