Nearly a disaster. Energia rocket first launch with Polyus.

[malamagr]

Kudos to the flight safety officer for holding off on pushing the abort button. Guess he learned after reading the letters from Siberia from the guy who destroyed the N-1 when it could still have completed its flight.

[johnnyrocksable]

The bottom line is the vehicle corrected itself and continued on. But in reality it was very scary to watch it pitch and wondering what was next. Companies are not going to invest in a heavy payload and pay a bunch of money to TRY TO LAUNCH it. Unless it's part of the space station or a military payload there's probibly not too many companys that need to put a school bus into orbit. Today the big thing is communication satellites. You don't need a Saturn V to launch one.

[astrohardy]

I think that the launch was nominal. What we see here is very similar to the Saturn V yaw maneuver. I also disagree that there is no need for such a heavy launcher today. The ISS could have been put in orbit with 2 launches, instead they fiddle around and assemble modules instead of doing research up there for more than 10 years,

[14msviolet]

watcg

[artwleb]

Hey, guys, Rockets have an attitude control system so if the vehicle leans or yaws to one side the engines are gimbaled to bring it to a vertical attitude again Called gyroscopes in action.

[LazyRanma]

Actually, the rocket has few seconds of free run before stabilization automaton is turned on, and is allowed to have much greater heel. Since it's asymmetric, Plyus "drew" rocket to the right, but heel was within allowed values, and automaton corrected it once enabled.

Later they changed program to turn stabilization automaton earlier.

[camilleri63]

Whoa! I don't know if that 'correction' was programmed or not, but it looked scarey lol. Although the Saturn V made a similar maneouvre right after liftoff (to steer it away from the tower) it only tilted by about 1 degree if I remember right. And that was pretty scarey if you werent expecting it.

[phadil]

Energia was design to carry a space shuttle piggyback on it. maybe the technicians forgot to modify the software and the rocket try to compensate for the nonexistence extra weight on it's back.

[r0ck3tsm0k3]

The soviets had, on the whole, some great rockets. Too bad they didnt seem to always have the money or time to do what they wanted, or the right motivations.

[gadinaaa]

It was just bad timing. This rocket came too late for the cold war (it was about to end and the military lost their interest), but too early for the market: even today commercial payloads for such a heavy launcher simply do not exist.

Its a pity because it was the most technically perfect heavy launcher. Depending on the core and count of strap-on boosters (modified Zenit) it could be configured in the range of 35-200 tonnes to LEO with fully automated launch preparations.

[heound]

Talk About N1.

[Intertracer]

AFAIK chemical laser, weight of which justified such hell of a booster...

[MalRenyolds]

You do know that Polyus was actually a mock up weapons system, right?

[buranfr]

No this movement was not expected, and was corrected for the launch of Buran.

[irishguy2000007]

I am assuming that the weight of Polyus caused Energia to lean to the right but the computers controlled the engine flow so throttled the far engine to straighten her up. Very scary.

[buranfr]

NO this movement was not expected, and was corrected to the Buran launch.

[VooDooRocketry]

Was that an adjustment they had to make to correct for the Buran's drag and weight not being included?

[astrogreg]

Sorry but this movement was expected, the engineers programed it to apply the corrections to align the rocket to its final latitude.

[buranfr]

No this movement was not expected, and was corrected for the launch of Buran.

[astrogreg]

Sorry I inverted this movement with the inclination alignement which occurs just some seconds after. You're right.