This is a serious question, not related to today’s date.
I need to contact someone, a producer will do, that works on MythBusters to inquire about the blast boxes they use whenever they blow something up. I have need of something like this for work, and what I want to know is if they made their own, or bought a commercial product.
I made official inquiries to Discovery, and they have no information because the show is an independent production. Any Dopers happen to know contact information, or even better, happen to know someone who works on the show that I could ask?
I anybody else bothered by the fact that NASA needs to ask someone else how to make a blast shield? I mean, they’ve been working with explosives for HOW long???
The task was to research a commercial product that’s portable, and see through. We happen to do the permanent, opaque shields quite well, thank you very much.
Apropos of nothing, I was at Marshall Space Flight Center relating to work, and the camera operator there told us that currently they set up at 4000 and 8000 yards from the shuttle launch pad when they film the launches. He says at 4000 yards, the shockwave will flutter your shirt. At any rate, just up the road from his office there was a memorial, or mock up of the launch pad of the original test rockets (Atlas? I don’t remember). So there on the pad was a rocket, not terribly large, but big enough, and not 100 yards away, was a big mound of dirt with a big steel door. His comment? “Yeah, the Germans liked to be up close and personal with their rockets”.
Now, I’ve been involved in some spectacular RC plane crashes, but REALLY!
[shakes head] Ah, boys and their toys…
How big is this thing you’re flying?
And didn’t you read any of Isaac Asimov’s stories growing up? You guys obviously need a good robot psychologist on hand so your robo-planes can have quality therapy instead of being left in suicidal despair.
And I don’t find it at all reassuring that NASA staffers are now doing research on this message board. I mean, it’s all very flattering to us, but you’d think NASA would have this in hand already. You can put a man on the moon yadda-yadda-yadda but you don’t have transparent, portable blast-bunkers? Yeah, yeah - probably different department, right?
Ages ago I read a book written by a guy who was one of the engineers at Peenemunde when they were working on the V-2. He told of a morning early on when they were doing one of the first test launches. He wasn’t part of the launch crew so instead of being at the site, he was walking along the beach about a half mile away. There were some off-duty soldiers lounging on the sand dunes, and a friend of his was about fifty yards away. He was walking towards his friend to say something to him when the rocket went up, got to about a half mile high, then rolled on its side and headed right at them.
The soldiers “vanished like dust blown off a shelf” and he and the friend started running towards a nearby bunker. The friend made it but the writer saw he wouldn’t and threw himself flat an instant before the impact. When the trucks pulled up a minute later, the two of them were standing on the lip of a twenty-foot deep crater looking at a collection of flattened rocket parts. Old habits die hard, I guess.
