Too heady for me. I just mean you were presuming something was there to fall out.
Ah OK. I wondered what that whoosh was going over my head
Gravity, when the feeling's gone and you can't go on, it's gravity
- Thread starter RudeCurve
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Ah OK. I wondered what that whoosh was going over my head
I didn't claim it's the be-all-end-all "truth", but definitely worth further researching. I guess it would be easy to repeat the experiment in a vacuum chamber, that shouldn't be a problem.
The same effect was observed during the launches of first satellites etc. by NASA using rotating solid fuel rockets, Von Braun even summoned some scientists with rather esoteric theories while trying to explain why the spin affected the altitude that produced the higher orbit than planned. Russians discovered the same problems and they even had no rotating parts in their rockets but the gyroscopes. Their first shot at the moon missed by a huge margin (it got there way earlier/faster than expected), the second try contained the corrections for gyroscopes and it hit the target dead-on. So as it seems both sides found the right way to compensate for the effects, but I have no idea what the exact problem or the fix looks like.
Could we have a link to an article on what Von Braun's theories were?
Er, well, there is no conceivable way that those rockets could have been rotating anywhere close to fast enough for the rotation to have a gravitational effect.
I can't imagine NASA launched any rockets that rotated more than the slightest bit, as rotation would fuck with the gyros of the inertial guidance system. Also, rotating rocket = rotating satellite, meaning you'd have a seriously spinning cargo once you get up into space, and that's also not very practical.
Xxx, got any souce links for your claims on rotating rockets?
Xxx, got any souce links for your claims on rotating rockets?
That depends on the payload. For many missions having the payload spin is all part of the design. Usually this is spin-up is achieved after it separates from the launcher though.
Fair enough, but surely the payload doesn't spin at several tens of thousands of RPM or more?
I would expect relativistic spinning to be required, actually, for such low-mass objects to produce a measurable effect. That would be about 3MHz rotation rate for a 1 meter radius object to get to 1% of the speed of light at its surface, or 180 million RPM's.Fair enough, but surely the payload doesn't spin at several tens of thousands of RPM or more?
Perhaps the effect could be detected before you get to those high of rotations, but I doubt you could do better than a couple of magnitude slower rotation.
Mintmaster
Veteran
To put that in perspective, a penny welded to the circumference of this object would have a centripetal force of almost a trillion Newtons. That's the weight of 400 Sears Towers. Adamantium flywheels FTW!
LOL! These types of threads are always amusing.
I've had similar discussions with laymen friends who also claimed "You can't explain to me why <insert ridiculous gadget/device/tech> won't work, so you're 'opinion' isn't any more correct than mine." But in reality, I was not able to explain why they were wrong *in a way they could understand*. Some (most?) discussions require both parties to have some basic education/understanding of how things work, or it's not worth the effort.
I've had similar discussions with laymen friends who also claimed "You can't explain to me why <insert ridiculous gadget/device/tech> won't work, so you're 'opinion' isn't any more correct than mine." But in reality, I was not able to explain why they were wrong *in a way they could understand*. Some (most?) discussions require both parties to have some basic education/understanding of how things work, or it's not worth the effort.
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If it's unguided missiles then that might be the case (like, WWII->1950s era weapons tech), but if there's a guidance system onboard then rotation would most likely only complicate matters...
That depends, some guided missiles do rotate, like the TOW and the RAM SAM missile. Can't say I know why exactly, as like you said, intuitively that seems to add a fair bit more complexity to the guidance.
How fast is fast enough then? And does size (mass) matter here?
Grall: no links at the moment, but it's all just speculation anyway. The only sure fact is that the rockets (both the mentioned US launches as well as the first russian shot at the moon) reached way higher altitudes than expected and it seems like it was somehow related to spinning/rotating parts, since liquid fuel rockets with no rotating parts had no such problems.
EDIT: here's a link I found in google, with the description of the anomaly but also with loads of crazy interpretation and esoteric beliefs in there: http://www.enterprisemission.com/Von_Braun.htm
(it mentions the spinning balls experiment in there as well in "Part II")
Rotation is required for solid fuel rockets because of mass imbalance, not the precision issues. Liquid fuel rockets don't require rotation.
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