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Пишет DK (![[info]](http://lj.rossia.org/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} k_d_s)@ 2020-07-19 00:39:00 |
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| Настроение: |  sleepy |
German rockets over the Congo | DW Documentary
https://youtu.be/HB26MHTC3Xs
“In 1971,” explains Otrag executive Frank Wukasch, “the German government gave contracts to several companies, including Otrag’s predecessor, to investigate low-cost rockets. All the others said, ‘We can reduce here a little bit, change there a little bit, and make a rocket for 5 to 10 percent less than the usual price.’ We said we could make a rocket for 80 percent less than the usual price. The government said, ‘OK, thank you.’ And that was the end. Everybody was laughing at us.”
Wukasch, who is 32 and the assistant to Otrag president Lutz Kayser, enjoys telling this story. A few minutes later, he sets up a projector in the conference room of the Otrag technical office here in Vaihingen, a Stuttgart suburb, and shows me a movie of a long shiny rocket blasting off from an African plateau. It is Otrag’s first test launch, May 17th, 1977. “This proved that our theories were right!” Wukasch exults as the rocket flies up. He puts on another film. This one shows the second successful Otrag launch on May 20th of this year. Then it shows Zaire president Mobutu Sese Seko arriving at the test site, flanked by guards waving machine guns, to watch the third test on June 5th.
The rebel invasion of Kolwezi, 350 miles from the Otrag site, was still simmering, but Mobutu found time to watch the rocket fly. Only it didn’t fly for long. It lifted off, went into a planned arc, failed to come out of it, and crashed into the Luvua River valley a few kilometers away. “It wasn’t so disappointing,” Wukasch insists as we watch the rocket veer off the screen. “It proves we can steer the vehicle and it proves the vehicle flies in all possible attitudes; even nose down.” He seems genuinely unfazed. “We had the proof that it could be done and done at low cost, and we did it.”
https://www.bernd-leitenberger.de/o
http://www.astronautix.com/k/kayser.htm
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