Rocket porn

There are dorks, and there are dorks. And then there's me, who shot model rockets into the atmosphere above Kansas City, went to Space Camp (and Space Academy and Aviation Challenge), and is still hoping some benevolent zillionaire out there would like to send a journalist into space.

Maybe that explains why I find this so fascinating, even in slow motion. ESPECIALLY in slow motion:



And if you weren't convinced of the depths of my dorkiness yet, let me throw some trivia at you.

-Those sparks in the video are there to ignite any excess hydrogen (the fuel for the Shuttle's main engines) and oxygen that might build up beneath the launch stack. Notice how once the main engines get throttled all the way up, the sparks actually bounce off the exhaust as if it were solid.

-The engines don't ignite simultaneously. The delay--which you can see clearly in slow-motion--is 120/1000th of a second.

-When all three of the engines light and throttle up, the shuttle stack actually sways forward.

-There is a delay of a few seconds between main engine ignition and ignition of the solid rocket boosters (the big pointy things under the shuttle's wings). If anything goes wrong with the startup of the engines during those few seconds, the launch can stop. If the SRBs light, well, you're leaving the ground.

-As impossibly powerful as those engines are (each produces about 400,000 pounds of thrust), together they don't even produce as much thrust as a single F-1 engine (1.5 million pounds of thrust), five of which were used to launch the Saturn V booster that shot the Apollo missions into space.

Cool stuff, right? Right?