FWD: Giant, Un-Used NASA Rocket Found...?

here the sad history of the place


http://www.astronautix.com/engines/aj2602.htm


by the way, the big booster in silo ist SL-3 of AJ-260 program
 
Great video ------------------- 6,000,000 lbs. of thrust from SL3 AWESOME ;D
 
Nicely done. The editors got a little confused between "Nova" and "Mercury-Atlas" from time to time, but the narration was good and the clips of the facility construction and tests were worth the wait.
 
Cool ! Rocket archeology ! That kind of reminds me of the discovery of the U-Boat bunker that had a couple of relatively intact type XX submarines in it a few decades ago. Although it seems he was not there first, as can be seen by the graffitis on the site. I wonder how he found out about this. Too bad he uses some cheap HDR on several of his shots, a technique i am not too fond of. Otherwise it is impressive, it must be real quiet up there, apart from the birds (and the few gators...).

A pity the silo`s been sealed though, and they demolished the shed. I guess this being located near a canal leading to the Atlantic Ocean they thought 'someone' might get creative and bring giant cranes and giant trucks along with a barge and a large cargo ship and run away with the whole thing under the cover of darkness... (ya, like there are a lot of people who would like to play with something like that which is over 50 years old... solids are not known to age very well after such a long period of time. Just wonder if the whole thing was still loaded. It would be very surprising they would have left something like that loaded before vacating the place... Will check the videos).
 
What's sort of confusing is the "secret" aspect of this . . in that it was never a secret. There's a lot of stuff on NTRS about it (used to be much more). If you watch the documentary, you'll see that the locals were not only informed about what was going on, but were gung-ho and hoped to see thousands of jobs materialize out of the effort. Once the AJ-260 program was shut down and Aerojet left, the whole site really lost its purpose.

It's more precise to say the project has been forgotten, rather than it having been under wraps. The buildings that were demolished were in a deteriorating state, especially after Hurricane Andrew. C-111, the Aerojet Canal, like most man-made efforts in the Everglades, really screwed up the water flow and, I think, the water management district is proposing to fill it in. Except for space geeks and the occasional urban explorer, it's just some old land and buildings. For those with a sense of history[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif], [/font][font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]it's a sad and lonely reminder of what might have been.[/font]
 
Who called it "secret"?

But ultimately, it's not that unusual for somebody to suddenly "discover" something that lots of people were already aware of. I remember how a few years ago somebody "discovered" a couple of MOL training spacesuits at the Air Force space museum in Florida. Apparently these had never really been lost, somebody had simply put them away in a closet or something and years later somebody was doing inventory and rediscovered them. And then it was suddenly big news.
 
I frequently re-discover stuff i had thought long lost or out of stock which i had moved to some other place and 'forgotten' (and that`s just me in my apartment !). Sometimes find stashes of brand new unused cast parts.

Still, i find it kind of weird that they would go to the length (and expense) of installing that whole series of humongous concrete bridge beams on top of the silo just to avoid the small possible risk of one urban explorer or graffiter falling into the hole... In any case, saw the videos, looks like it was just one empty giant size solid rocket canister. Nothing very glamorous. Thought the installations and 'forgotten' buildings and bunkers look interesting, if only from he point of view of seeing a large size abandoned rocket test site.

Ya, i see that the story was quite the news in Dade county back when Aerojet came. I think that most people who were not locals probably didn't even know about that installation, no wonder i had not heard about it (unless i had spent time digging into the fine details of the Apollo program).

About the what could have been, i am glad they did not succeed at putting this one in service, given the amount of pollution this booster generated (and that was still far from being the complete stack...): paint peeling off cars located many miles away, damage to the agricultural production due to the acid residue left from the giant cloud of toxic smoke... (not to mention damage to the local wildlife, soil and water no doubt). Nasty stuff. And they found at least one large piece of the test stand that flew and fell miles away. I just wonder how the SRB booster pollution compared next to this one in terms of combustion by-products and fall-outs, i never spent time looking at it, all i know is that they are burning aluminum powder, but obviously a resin binder as well.
 

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