Wednesday, July 8, 2009

MLAS takes to the Air!





Wahoo!  Look at that gooneybird go!

After several delays in June, I found yesterday that the
MLAS was scheduled to fly this morning 7/8/09. Well
it took off at 6:25AM ET, which is soon after the launch
window opened, so it seems the countdown went well.

There are only a few sparce articles out so far, but that
should grow, shortly. I've seen 2 ascent pics so far.  
Despite the massive base drag, I was hoping to see the
individual flames of the severely canted boost motors,
however you can seethe lobes they create in the smoke
column.
Now that the MLAS has made it's 1st successful flight,
it paves the way for the rest of the MLAS test program.  
It also takes it from an interesting sport modroc and turns
it into a legal NAR scale subject.

The 2nd pic above is NASA's picture of the day today.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/iotd.html
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6 comments:

  1. Gaetano MaranoJuly 8, 2009 at 1:40 PM

    .

    then, NASA has successful tested MY (February 10, 2007) idea of a (safer and better) "underside-LAS":

    http://www.ghostnasa.com/posts/019mlas.html

    http://www.gaetanomarano.it/articles/020newLAS.html

    http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=11053.msg432447#msg432447

    MY "underside-LAS" (now called NASA "MLAS"...) is MUCH BETTER than the Orion's "Eiffel Tower" LAS:

    http://www.ghostnasa.com/posts/029eiffeltowerlas.html

    .

    ReplyDelete
  2. KenKzakJuly 8, 2009 at 9:40 PM

    No they haven't.
    The MLAS has little to nothing in common with your design, the MLAS is NOT an underside system. The MLAS is comprised of the new capsule shroud and the abort motors mounted inside the shroud ABOVE the base of the capsule. In any case the abort motors were inert on this flight. The motors fired today are for boosting the test vehicle to a suitable height to conduct the initial experiments, they are not actually part of the abort system experiments.

    ReplyDelete
  3. JoshBJuly 9, 2009 at 4:59 PM

    Video of this test:
    http://www.space.com/common/media/video/player.php?videoRef=SP_090708_mlas-launch

    ReplyDelete
  4. KenKzakJuly 9, 2009 at 7:37 PM

    Thanks Josh.
    My PC & OS are too old for most vids so I don't think about posting them either.

    ReplyDelete
  5. KenKzakJuly 9, 2009 at 7:42 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  6. KenKzakJuly 17, 2009 at 6:19 PM

    I finally got to see the
    flight vid on a friends PC.
    Wahoo! That was great, it was
    shedding parts and chutes everywhere!

    ReplyDelete

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