Steve, Allan, et Listers,
My apologies to Steve for, once again, associating him with some wrong
information. As Steve has politely informed me, his rocket was a Titan IVB,
not a Saturn. Sorry Steve, right model, wrong god. Adding to my confusion,
Titan is the largest of Saturn's 18 moons, where Steve's Titan rocket has
helped to send the Cassini probe. A quick search of the Web gives numerous
hits on "Titan rocket" that discuss, in addition to the several recent
unsuccessful launches of the Titan, interesting information on the Cassini
probe. To wit;
"The last of the big-budget, big-mission planetary probes, Cassini stands
over two stories tall and weighs more than six tons. At $3.4 billion, its
budget dwarfs the recent Mars Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor missions.
In the tradition of Viking, Voyager, and Galileo, Cassini's mission is
ambitious. If all goes according to plan, it will travel some 2.2 billion
miles over more than a decade, carrying 18 complex science instruments and
dispatching a probe dubbed Huygens to the surface of Titan, the largest of
Saturn's 18 known moons. More than half of Cassini's liftoff weight is
fuel. It will be propelled into orbit by a Titan IVB/Centaur rocket, the
largest expendable booster in the U.S. space fleet."
This amongst lots of other titles like;
" Explosion of Titan rocket figured as $1.3 billion loss "
"The Titan 4 rocket has been used in several recent space launches. Just
this August, another Titan 4 rocket exploded. Thankfully, that launch was
not for a deep space plutonium probe like last fall's Cassini Saturn probe,
which contained enough plutonium (72 pounds) to give everyone on Earth
thousands of maximum doses each."
For us boys on more modest toy budgets, may I suggest the following URL:
http://www.alltherightstuff.com/space.html
where, for example, you can get a NASA Saturn V rocket replica on sale for
only $9.95.
TTFN,
Bob
At 10:47 PM 5/26/99 -0700, Bob Palmer wrote:
>Allan, Steve,
>
>Thanks guys, it's been several days since I've had such a good laugh. I
>figure if someone on the List posts a comment every few days about this PCV
>thing, it'll pretty soon send Steve right over the edge. It's easy to see
>he's already starting to fray a bit around the edges. ;-) I guess the good
>news is his latest Saturn IVB finally delivered a payload. Maybe it's
>because they got their "Product Control Valve" working.
Robert L. Palmer
Dept. of AMES, Univ. of Calif., San Diego
rpalmer@ames.ucsd.edu
rpalmer@cts.com
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