Loved the Saturn V lift-offs – but where were I, II, III and IV?
I was saddened to hear of the death of Richard Baker last week. Can you tell me who the other news readers were when they sang There’s Nothing Like A Dame on the Morecambe & Wise Show? – D.
The 1977 Christmas show featured BBC stars – Baker, Michael Aspel, Frank Bough, Philip Jenkinson, Barry Norman, Eddie Waring, Richard Whitmore and Peter Woods.
The song was a spoof of the Rodgers and Hammerstein clsssic. OMD’s Enola Gay is about the plane that dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, but which plane dropped the second, on Nagasaki? – R.
Bockscar was the name of the United States Army Air Force B-29 bomber that dropped a Fat Man nuclear weapon over the Japanese city of Nagasaki.
The Enola Gay also flew the mission, as a reconnaissance plane.
Ialways enjoy documentaries about NASA and the Apollo missions to the moon.
I particularly love to see the lift-off of the missions, as the mighty Saturn V rockets take the brave astronauts on their journey.
But were there Saturn I, II, III and IV rockets before that? – G.
There were. The Saturn I was the United States’ first heavy-lift dedicated space launcher, a rocket designed specifically to launch large payloads into low Earth orbit.
It made its first flight on October 27, 1961, and made a total of 10 successful launches.
There were Saturn II, III and IV rockets, but they were never launched into space.
Instead, they were used by engineers to test and develop the craft that would become the mighty Saturn V. There were 13 launches of the Saturn V, and six of these took 12 men to the moon.
Its first flight was on November 9, 1957, from the Cape Canaveral launch pad in Florida.
It towered 110 metres high and weighed 2.8 million kg, fully loaded.
It had 7.5 million pounds of thrust and could carry 118,000 kg into Earth orbit.
Twelve minutes after lift-off, it reached 185 km (115 m) high and a speed of 28,157 km/h (17,500 mph) to enter Earth orbit.
It burned liquid oxygen and kerosene at a rate of 15 tons per second during launch – which means it burned more fuel in one second than Charles Lindbergh used in his historic flight across the Atlantic in 1927, just 30 years earlier. I had to laugh at the stink raised in a darts match last week when players accused each other of breaking wind. Wasn’t there another row like this a few years ago? – B.
There was, but it wasn’t a gust of wind, more a little draught.
The 2012 World Darts semi-final between Adrian Lewis and James Wade was halted for two hours because they said a draught was hampering the flight of their arrows.