Apollo 15 airborne tracking camera [SILENT]

Tracking camera footage (normal speed) of Apollo 15 from an airborne tracking camera. Runs from about 1 minute after liftoff until after tower jett.

Note how at the end of 1st stage burn the exhaust engulfs the entire back of the rocket, visibly charring half of the first stage.

Inboard cutoff: 01:19 into the video
Staging: 01:49
Skirt sep : 02:28
Tower jettison: 02:34

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• apollo
• 15
• saturn
• moon
• rocket
• tracking
• camera
• launch

[lardo444]

yes i realize that, but someone did the math, and changed the wieght to gallons, then the distance to "no burn" and came up with 5 inches per gallon. so if it burned all its fuel in 12 min. what distance is that? divided by the amount of fuel.

peace, lardo.

[ugowar]

@lardo444 I don't know the downrange number off hand, it could be dug up online. Still, that's a useless metric. Why stop counting after 12 min as the rocket kept going at the same speed afterward. It also didn't use up all the fuel afterward. It only used up all the fuel after translunar injection which was some hour and a half after launch. If you take that time and distance it travelled until then, you'll get a much better "mileage".

[thetrolone]

i was waiting for the damn gun to fire for over two minutes!

[ugowar]

@thetrolone LOL!

[lardo444]

@ugowar i read somewhere that the Saturn 5 rockets got 5 inches per gallon of fuel.

do you know what the fuel ratio per mile was?

peace, lardo.

[ugowar]

@lardo444 There is no fuel ratio per mile for a rocket. It's not traveling on a road. While the rocket burns its fuel, it's continuously losing mass so the same engine thrust causes it to accelerate faster and faster. Not only does it pick up speed, but it's *rate* of picking up speed increases. Even though it looks like it's moving slowly immediately after liftoff (which is also an illusion as the rocket is huge), 12 minutes later it's going 17 thousand mph.

[ftucyk]

I have a message to all the stupid people, hwo don't believe in the Apollo program! Look at this video!

[kush2121]

This video is fucking amazing. Thank you for sharing it.

[jetfreak4]

@redsblackipod No need, I believe you. And given that's the case, there is no reason why we couldn't build a rocket with 5 times the capability of the Saturn V today. With today's technology we could potentially land men not only on the moon, but on Mars, and moons of other planets. Sadly, we haven't found a way to make it any less expensive. Big, massive rockets will be required to go to other celestial bodies, no two ways about it.

[redsblackipod]

@jetfreak4 im with you all the way. Besides, if you really think about it, NASA was really hard core in those days, cause mission control only had the capacity of a laptop, even though it took a full floor of computers, and the spacecraft's computer had the capacity of a digital watch! google it!

[Leddyzee]

What aircraft was used as the camera platform?

[JuggaloOzi]

It's not exhaust flames during the stage separation. Retro rockets have to fire to pull the S-1C out of the way. These are hidden in the engine fairing and fire before the 2nd stage ignites.

[usaeagle1776]

from this to hitchin rides with the russkies....wow.

[charliegoodboy]

@charliegoodboy It did lift skylab into orbit. They have a complete skylab at the Smithsonian in washington dc, you should check it out. ISS is massive though, and pretty awesome especially with that viewing module they added a couple years ago.

[jetfreak4]

@charliegoodboy It's still unbelievable to me this was 40 years ago....manned spaceflight I can say is really the only area humans haven't improved really improved on since 1972 technologically. It's a tragedy and in my opinion a disgrace that the Saturn V was thrown away after such a short period of me. It could launch an entire space station in one mission, carry the heaviest payload ever carried into LEO for the moon missions. I would trust my life with that rocket over the shuttle.

[jetfreak4]

The fact that the Saturn V came out of 1960s technology still takes my breath away. Even by today's standards it has no equals. It's launch escape tower had more thrust than the first Mercury rockets less than ten years before its time. How we got from the Boeing 707 to the Boeing 747, and from the Mercury to the Saturn V in just over a decade is unbelievable. Even crazier still is that we went from barely being able to stay in orbit to landing on the moon in under a decade. Just fucking unreal.

[charliegoodboy]

Nice footage, among the hours and hours available to the public for over 40 years, but finally widely viewed thanx to Youtube...Bravo!

[jetfreak4]

@ugowar You're about the decreasing mass, but after maximum dynamic pressure the engine thrust actually increased to around or in excess of 9 million pounds total before center engine cutoff. So the engine thrust itself was actually increasing due to the thinning atmosphere and basically absent air resistance. From max Q to staging (just over 1 minute), velocity increased by 5000 mph, its altitude by about 30 miles, and its downrange distance by over 50 miles. One of the greatest machines ever.