Flight
Saturn-Apollo 3 launched at 17:45:02 on November 16, 1962, from Launch Complex 34. The only hold in the countdown sequence was for 45 minutes due to a power failure in ground support equipment. This mission was the first time the Saturn I rocket was launched with a full load of propellant, carrying approximately 750,000 pounds (340,000 kg) of fuel.
The vehicle's four inner H-1 engines shut down at 2 minutes 21.66 seconds after launch and an altitude of 38.19 miles (61.46 km), and its four outer engines shut down at 2 minutes 29.09 seconds and 44.19 miles (71.11 km); both sets burned slightly longer than was initially estimated, reaching a maximum velocity of 4,046 miles per hour (6,511 km/h). The vehicle continued to coast to an altitude of 103.91 miles (167.22 km) and range of 131.36 miles (211.41 km), at which point, 4 minutes 52 seconds after launch, officials sent a terminate command to the rocket, setting off several charges which caused the dummy stages of the vehicle to destruct. The first stage remained intact, though uncontrolled, until it impacted the Atlantic Ocean around 270 miles (430 km) from its launch site.
Read more about this topic: Saturn I SA-3
Famous quotes containing the word flight:
“Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason’s imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work.”
—Louis Aragon (1897–1982)
“The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“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)