Thor Rocket - How A 'Temporary Solution' Became America's Most Popular Launch Vehicle

[@bryanwilson8652]

Finally, something else that comes up when I google “Thor Rocket” that isn’t related to a buff blonde man and a raccoon.

[@AadidevSooknananNXS]

Beat me to it!

[@drunkpaulocosta]

@@AadidevSooknananNXS didnt beat Scott to it as its the first thing he says in the video basically

[@baconpancakes1752]

Kinky...

[@theussmirage]

Funny you mention that, as both things you mentioned show up 15 seconds into this video!

[@blingbling574]

I was expecting a piece of cheese

[@My3nMy4]

Going a little further down the rabbit hole - Telstar 1, which was launched on a Thor Delta (DM-19), was killed by the Starfish test which itself was launched by a Thor. The God of Thunder giveth, the God of Thunder take the away…

[@JAMoore-zz3ki]

For those curious about the t-shirt...... It's referring to all the ways you can die in a video game called The Long Dark, by a company called Hinterland Studios. Hinterland also sells the t-shirt. (Or at least they did, pre-pandemic. No idea what their status is now.)

[@Lucius_Chiaraviglio]

I was going to say, that's a pretty dire shirt.

[@lenajesse]

Thank you🙂 I kept staring at the shirt and was really puzzled 😄 I don't play the game so my best guess was "all the ways you can die if you travel" ...or go outside" 😄

[@catfish552]

Very nice, thank you! I'd assumed it was something like that, but I guessed Oregon Trail.

[@Tfaonc]

I thought it was going to be a "xxxxx can kill me, but names will never hurt me" kind of thing.

[@gsnedders_legacy]

Ahhhhhhh! Well that makes a lot of sense. (Also a game I need to go back and play more of!)

[@Fred_Bender]

My father worked for Chrysler aerospace from 1958 through the end of Skylab . He started with NACA working at Langley AFB .He assisted with development of grooved runways for jets .Every time I drive on grooved pavement I am reminded of his contribution.I still have his old Chrysler hard hat,Skylab Medal and NACA pin.

[@judet2992]

Dude that’s some sick physical artifacts for his memory!

[@WWeronko]

Any decision of the Thor IRBM should include is sister rocket the Jupiter IRBM. The sibling rivalry between the two developments for which was two nearly identical rockets was legendary. The Jupiter team, under the direction of Wernher von Braun built the better more reliable rocket initially. The Jupiter program was more successful due to far better testing and preparations. The Jupiter missiles were also used in a series of suborbital biological test flights. The Saturn I and Saturn IB rockets were manufactured by using a single Jupiter propellant tank, in combination with eight Redstone rocket propellant tanks clustered around it, to form a powerful first stage launch vehicle. It could be said Saturn I and IB were derivatives of the Jupiter program. The Jupiter MRBM was also modified by adding upper stages, in the form of clustered Sergeant-derived rockets, to create a space launch vehicle called Juno II. It launched Pioneer 3, Pioneer 4, Explorer 7, Explorer 8, and Explorer 11. One of the two rocket programs would have been canceled due to their near identical performance and Thor having the significant higher failure rate probably would have been the canceled program. However, after the Soviet launches of Sputnik 1-2 in late 1957, US Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson announced that both Thor and Jupiter would go into service as his final act before leaving office. This was both out of fear of Soviet capabilities and also to avoid political repercussions from the workplace layoffs that would result at either Douglas or Chrysler if one of the two missiles were canceled. All very interesting rocket history.

[@topsecret1837]

Jupiter was a much more expensive rocket though. It was very similar to Thor but aside from a handful of launches it didn’t have a success rate that justified continuing launching it for that price after 1963.

[@mydogbrian4814]

> A von Braun *Saturn-1* derivative could have put a 15 ton Pioneer-1 satellite into earth orbit in 1957. If the US would have backed the Army Redstone Team with the same funding as the Air Force Atlas Team. - It was all about the clustered booster aproch using the well tested & operational Redstone. The same technique that, instead put the Russians into the history books. - And Space history would have been completely different.

[@advorak8529]

@@mydogbrian4814 Like the N1.

[@Roguescienceguy]

If Wernher were to somehow be resurrected I can only Imagine what he would say about the way things are being handled these days. Pretty sure that some very strong German swearwords would be used

[@the18thdoctor3]

@@mydogbrian4814 uh… what? Maybe you mean the Juno I, and maybe you mean 15 kilograms. And the Juno I’s clustering was on the upper stages.

[@robertburns8597]

Thanks Scott, for putting this together. I worked on the Block5d DMSP Weather satellite program in 79-81. We launched the Thor from SLC 10 West at Vandenberg AFB. I was the upper stage console operator. One of 25 blue suit enlisted launch crew members I the AF, I had 3 stripes! My all time favorite job!

[@jamiewilliams5134]

Nice that you mentioned Telstar. We at Goonhilly are celebrating 60 years since that first transatlantic communications test via satellite, which we received with our aerial 1(GHY1).

[@roderickreilly9666]

A friend of mine, the late Dick Morrison, helped develop that original Thor in record time. Morrison was one of America's post WWII rocket pioneers.

[@samsonsoturian6013]

There is nothing more permanent than temporary situations.

[@44R0Ndin]

Works in IT, works in spaceflight, after all they have a lot of overlap.

[@simongeard4824]

There's an infamous comment in the codebase I work on, to the effect of "if this is still here in a year's time, I'll eat my hat". That was written about twenty years ago.

[@advorak8529]

Temporary building structures like Quonset huts.

[@44R0Ndin]

@@simongeard4824 Reminds me of the "temporary" ethernet cable I ran from the router to my computer in my bedroom when we first got high-speed internet. I promised my parents it would be temporary, but it stayed there for about 2 years before I finally ran the cable thru the walls properly. Such things are also pretty much the norm when renting a living space, since you can't just do what you need to do to route the cable properly, so it gets temporarily stuck up with tape wherever it will hopefully stay out of the way. Ugly yes, but the situation demands it, and no you really shouldn't be relying on wi-fi especially in an apartment building because you just know that's gonna be a very crowded RF band so the throughput will be terrible and the ping will be all over the place, instead of the steady ping that you need for things like gaming and high throughput you need for things like making Netflix and other streaming services work. To this day I don't get why people settle for WiFi connections for their expensive gaming PC's. They always say "it can't be done". That's never the case. There is always a solution, even if it might be a bit ugly.

[@44R0Ndin]

@@advorak8529 Yes, go look at Boca Chica and try to tell me those tents were meant to be there for as long as they have been. I doubt that was the in"tent". If they were meant to be there for as long as they have been, they would have likely been made of some sort of metal, and it's not like they couldn't do that since they get so much stainless steel shipped in, all they'd really need is the girders (and they're getting girders shipped in to build things like the launch tower and the high bay, so those supply lines are also already in place). I guess the time it takes to convert to a more permanent structure instead of the tents just hasn't been available. Or maybe I'm full of crap and they intended those tents to be permanent structures, at least permanent enough that they would be there for going on 3 or more years now.

[@cliffwhite5963]

My father, Col. RW Walton (Ret), was the launch coordinator of the first all military crew to put a satellite in orbit (wx sat for Russian air space SAC). The sat was on a Thor our to Vandenberg on March 17, 1965. I was 15 yo and had no clue of that compliment as it was classified. I have a photo of the Thor on the launch pad.

[@Papershields001]

A couple years ago I was working right next to Goddard and a snowstorm was about to hit so everything was closed and there was nobody around. I went and got a sub on my lunch break and snuck around back into the Rocket garden behind the visitor’s center and ate a meatball sub using their entire stacked Thor Delta as a parasol. Good times. Cool looking rocket. 10 out of 10 would trespass again.

[@glhx2112]

Thanks for this episode ! I spent the last 8 years of my USAF career stationed at Vandenberg AFB, and was able to explore all of those old Thor launch sites shown in your video. A surprising amount of the old Thor (And Atlas) launch infrastructure was still present when I left the base back in the mid 2000's. Some of the launch sites were re-purposed for other programs. I did not know about Ground Guidance being used, that is new to me, but, I do know Atlas used that system, or, at at least some of the old Atlas systems did.

[@scottmanley]

Ground vs Onboard navigation is something that changed over time as technology advanced and requirements changed.

[@matthewmartin5763]

Even after watching Scott for nearly 10 years, starting with KSP tutorials; I still want to fire up the game and play. Especially when he does videos on early US rockets like these. Scott, I credit you with my ever growing knowledge of orbital mechanics. You taught me WTH hyper-golic fuel is. And, so much more. I could go on and on. I think I speak for a majority of your viewers when I say that I appreciate all you do to help educate people on really complicated stuff.

[@Carstuff111]

This is one of many reasons I love this channel, thank you as always for the content!

[@dewayneblue1834]

Such unique looks on those stub-nosed Thor-DM18As, as well as the long 'lance' on the Thor-Able 2s. Definitely icons of the early Space Age.

[@r0cketplumber]

After that nuke launch failure, Johnston island became the world's only open-cast plutonium mine.

[@jsfriedberg]

Outstanding video. I remember the Thor / Delta for its reliability in so many different roles. What tremendous value its team delivered over the years! Thank you, Scott, for highlighting this important piece of our nation's technological and security history.

[@Hurricane1668]

I'm 68...This stuff is what I grew up with. Love it!

[@aledandrian]

I love videos like this about the history of launch systems, please keep making more of them

[@RCAvhstape]

7:28 that Lockheed ad for the Agena stage is classic. You could do a whole video about the Agena, which was a real workhorse for America in the early days of spaceflight.

[@MIflyer5124]

I was the last USAF Thor Program Manager. The last launch was in 1980 and we shut the program down in 1981 because the final Thor payload, DMSP Block 5D-2, had gotten larger and heavier and moved on to converted Atlas E ICBMs. The mandatory use of the Shuttle meant that no one was designing payloads capable of being launched by Thor, and although I often heard the claim that, "There are payloads out there for Thor but you are just not looking for them hard enough!" that was not just true. You would have thought there were homeless people wandering the streets with spacecraft under their arms, people who would have been healthy, happy and productive if they could have just found a rocket. When we shut the program down we had four intact LV-2D boosters, basically the last of the SM-75's brought back from England, and five SLV-2A boosters. We also had an LV-2D fuel tank engine section and an SLV-2H fuel tank and engine section; the LOX tanks from those boosters had been used in ground tests to determine the vulnerability of ballistic missiles to lasers. After the loss of the Shuttle Challenger in 1986 the latest built engines from two of the SLV-2A were used for Delta boosters and the turbine wheels were removed from all of the other Thor MB-3 Block I and Block III engines in order to enable new RS-27 engines to be built for Delta boosters. It had been so long since we had built new MB-3 or RS-27 engines that the company that made the turbine wheels had gone out of business.

[@Tool-Meister]

Love Scott’s accent. Makes him sounding like he’s saying “Exploder VI”. Might be more accurate that way!

[@bhaskararaka]

Nothing more permanent than a “temporary solution”

[@orbitalair2103]

OK Scott, I expect a full 30 min video on the Delta series !!! I worked for Thiokol Huntsville from 87-92, as a Project Engineer (1 of 3) in the Castor Office. Then we were working CastorIVa for the 6900 series. We helped launched GPS. I was on pad17b helping McDac prep for the first launch (my first business trip) of DeltaII with Castor IVAs. IIRC we built over 210 CastorIVAs for DeltaII, with 100% success. Those CastorI motors were bleeding edge, they would burn out all the insulation and then about 1/4" of steel on the nozzle - talk about maximum impulse and minimum dead weight. We had a great team, but they wanted it all moved to Utah, so they shut us down.

[@rocketmentor]

If anyone wants to see the LR-79 Thor liquid booster thrust chamber I moved several of the LR-79 TCAs to the Saxon Aerospace Museum in Boron, CA out in front which can be seen from HWY 58 as you drive by, and a complete LR-79 engine with turbo pumps is at the New Mexico Museum of Aerospace History near Alamogordo NM outside at the entrance to the museum building. These engines were part of the SEALAR program by Bob Truax which I was the senior engineer. Ken

[@61Ldf]

Scott, another excellent video with Ed Kyle’s detailed drawings.

[@VictorDeVandenesse]

Very nice video on a not very famous rocket but mostly important for early US space program. There is the awesome KSP mod BlueDogDesignBureau that have all it's variants and payloads up to the Delta IV

[@fuzzyhead878]

I have BDB and FASA. Love both mods. I’ve been using them to create crazy Gemini/Apollo derived vehicles.

[@Tomyironmane]

I just love how the engine designation on the one upper stage started with XLR8. Someone has a sense of humor.

[@canadianragin]

I love how bluedog design bureau provides some of the top-quality Thor images

[@bioriderfc]

Thank you and Ed Kyle.

[@parallelflow]

When I opened the video I got an ad about some Thor-themed beer, and considering the channel and the topic it couldn't have fit better lol

[@rustygear447]

Nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution

[@petequintanilla4237]

Scott’s tee shirt sounds like me when I’m calling in sick to work.

[@camillovidani2586]

Your SEO game is impeccable, Scott

[@Arational]

Interesting bucket list t-shirt

[@jasonplant5432]

I absolutely love your channel.Mr Manley. Great stuff EVERYTIME.

[@CantankerousDave]

“Nothing lasts longer than a ‘temporary fix’ that works well enough.”

[@torybruno7952]

Nicely researched, Scott

[@msimpson54]

Scott can you do something about the “Titan” family? There is quite a bit out there about Gemini and the Titan 2 GLV but I can’t find much about Titan 3 and 4 that’s not rubbish or in about 140P xD

[@jmwoods190]

And while we're doing it- Add honorable mentions for the unbuilt LDC variants that have 4 engines on the 1st core stage with 2-4 SRMs aka Titans 3L2 & 3L4. The 3L4 would've had equal thrust to STS!

[@RCAvhstape]

Not to mention the Titan V, which was used by Zephram Cochrane to launch his prototype warp drive spacecraft.

[@richb313]

Thanks Scott for another history lesson in the development of rockets and their uses from the start until now.

[@orbitalair2103]

Great video Scott. Awesome pics and videos of launches.

[@MoonWeasel23]

Douglas is out here fielding a ballistic missile in 7 months while I can’t get a satellite finished in 2 years.

[@chrismorris6544]

Hello I work at Douglas and all the paper work and testing for everything takes time and a lot of wast unfortunately because each bird is a little different.And satellite are on the expensive side. Look at what happen with Delta III . Thank You I hope this help a little.

[@sporg]

Wonderful video as always, Scott. Great to see the Thor getting its story told in detail: there are so many early shots of Thor failures -- many on or near the launchpad -- that its later successes are often overlooked.

[@kevinturner6281]

Thanks for the video Scott, just wanted to correct you when you said that Thor missiles were launched from silo's in the UK, they were not, they were stored horizontally on a launch pad covered in a collapsible structure that would be retracted prior to the missile being raised vertically and fuelled prior to launch

[@HowP88]

If electric toothbrushes could fly

[@jackandersen1262]

Note that sometime in all of this the Agena D would have a propellant sump system allowing for main engine restart without ullage.

[@cooperthompson4850]

Finally,The thor video. I've waited so long.

[@aliteralpothole9205]

Thanks for making such great videos about space travel, Scott! Also, this has no relevance to your video, but what were your first opinions on the KSP “Scott Münley” mod?

[@rishiparitala88]

haha

[@declan9876]

that mod has been out for years now

[@aliteralpothole9205]

@@declan9876 I know

[@GerardHammond]

Lots of great stuff here. A mini deep dive into Thor

[@saltynarwhal]

Thanks for the vids sir!

[@sonnyburnett8725]

Thanks Scott, loved this review of the Thor booster history. You obviously did your homework on this. Awesome video.

[@petesheppard1709]

This was a very nice addition to my knowledge of the early space program (which I followed avidly as a kid). Thanks!!

[@OrenTirosh]

Whoa! That atlas gimbaling footage is great

[@w9gb]

I see that you used Ed Kyle’s well-documented history, as story reference !!

[@DonJoyce]

Wow, what a Thor-o discussion of this rocket family! Well done, Scott!

[@kemble9900]

There's nothing more permanent than temporary

[@brothergrimaldus3836]

Temporary government program....

[@TomLeg]

Love your cheerful, optimistic shirt!

[@BakuganBrawler211]

Let’s go! Can’t get enough of older rockets 🚀

[@bernieshort6311]

Good grief Scott, that T shirt you are wearing seems alarming, please could you tell me what it’s about? Your wealth of knowledge is amazing, and you must spend hours researching for these video's. Thanks for this video, stay safe, kind regards from England UK.

[@dcy665]

Fascinating, well done. Interesting data that allows all the variants to be recognized. Even by people who never connected with Thor missile systems with all these launches.

[@jocax188723]

I’m convinced ‘Thor Delta’ was chosen because ‘Thor Four’ was too difficult to say quickly

[@HuntingTarg]

It may have been partly that (phonetic considerations), and partly NASA/USAF wanting to get away from iterating what was originally a US Army designation for a weapon launch vehicle.

[@xbarryrs]

Is that a TLD shirt you are wearing? Thanks for all of your videos, love from Barry in Fife, Scotland!

[@KTo288]

the reason we have NASA is that the US Army, US Navy and US Air Force each had their own ballistic missile programs and pet space launch programs. It would seem wasteful but if there was any country with resources to waste it would be the USA and it could be argued that the three competing programs accelerated the development of rocket technology in the US.

[@RWBHere]

Thanks for this brief history of a very famous and pioneering rocket. 🙂

[@audiobrian1]

A great historical account here, to be sure, but what in the world is that t-shirt you’re wearing about, Scott??

[@drywinddotnet]

Great vid. I would disagree that the Starfish experiment disrupted communications "all around the world". But certainly disruption over a large area is correct. Thor's mythological "boomerang effect" is a good point! ;-)

[@kenhelmers2603]

Wow, quite the history! Thanks Scott :)

[@RTomassi]

Which is why it is generally frowned upon to use duct tape as a stop gap measure to fix stuff. It ends up being there way too long and might end up being the one thing upon which the ship relies for structural integrity...

[@RedSkysAreOnFire]

well explains why we had a teacher at school who told us that the apollo rockets were designed to carry nuclear warheads, they obviously heard about the thor rockets put 2 and 2 together but got 5 instead of the right answer.

[@jeromethiel4323]

You're thor!?! I'm so thor i can barely pith! ^-^

[@JoeyCarb]

The 50's and 60's were wild. I don't think there was a single thing that we didn't try to hit with a nuke.

[@blurglide]

Thor launching Corona was truly "Operationally responsive space". The curator of the museum that now sits where your video at the 5 minute mark was shot says they could get a tasking and have a Corona on orbit in less than two days.

[@zippy5131]

When I was on 5131 here in the UK, RAF North Luffenham used to be a base of ops and training ground, and there hidden away at the far side of the Airfield were the Thor launch sites still with the concrete covers. That was around 2005 don't know if they are still there.

[@scottmanley]

The Thor launch sites were concrete pads with Meta sheds that would slide off to uncover the missile.

[@zippy5131]

@@scottmanley Was a few years ago and much whiskey has passed under the bridge, I can not entirley recollect the covers but they were Thor sites as the base was a V bomber base as well.

[@RandomTheories]

Shoutout to Ed Kyle for all those blueprints 🙂

[@osama810]

Babe wake up Scott manley uploaded a video

[@nneeerrrd]

You'll end up sleeping on the sofa for that

[@oldmandoinghighkicksonlyin1368]

That's the problem with memes: they have a shelf life.

[@davewave1982]

Can you do a video discussing why rockets are so reliable now compared to how the first rockets always seemed to blow up on launch?

[@Br3ttM]

It's normal for new technologies to be unreliable until there has been enough time and testing to get them figured out, but hearing some of the specifics would be interesting. I know some of them got a few feet off the pad, then the engine failed, dropping them enough to burst.

[@joshuacheung6518]

Better simulations, more experience, better material science

[@olasek7972]

why - engineers learned from their mistakes

[@oldmandoinghighkicksonlyin1368]

SpaceX Starship still exploding. Something about pressurized explosive liquids being shot out of one end of a cylinder that is dangerous.

[@strayling1]

@@olasek7972 It would be interesting to learn what those mistakes were and how they were corrected.

[@markbrown4442]

Greatvideo, thanks Scott

[@LongPeter]

12:13 "Poppy, Heavy Ferret". Don't know how you managed to gloss over that one 😁

[@walter2990]

Now I can understand a little better, how SpaceX was able to develop such powerful rocket engines so "quickly". So many of the problems of engineering such complex Raptors & Merlin rocket engines, were discovered by thousands of previous rocket engine designs. Sadly, I remember seeing live, several of the "duds", launched from Canaveral in the '60.

[@TheEvilmooseofdoom]

Everybody builds off those that go before. But the Raptor is a tad more unique in some ways. There is nothing special about the Merlin except that they managed to get so much out of such a small engine but its cycle and fuel etc have been around and done before.

[@janmelantu7490]

@@TheEvilmooseofdoom I think the Merlin was the first major production engine that use pintle injectors, besides the limited run of Apollo LM descent engines.

[@IstasPumaNevada]

Yeah, the world's governmental space programs paved the way for private companies; it likely would have taken a lot longer for private aerospace to take off without that. However, SpaceX seems to be doing a lot better job of developing things quickly and cost-effectively than a lot of the big aerospace companies in modern times. Boeing and ULA and Lockheed and Arianespace and the other big players have had decades to innovate and pursue researching cost-effective fully-reusable rockets, but they never bothered to because they didn't need to. SpaceX's most important contribution is not their specific rockets, but showing that fully reusable stages can (and should) be done.

[@Mike-oz4cv]

How much of that knowledge and experience is actually publicly accessible?

[@LoanwordEggcorn]

The secret of SpaceX's (and Tesla's) rapid development is spiral development practices that have both very short design cycles and concurrent development. Spiral development was borrowed from Silicon Valley software development.

[@StrykerFox]

The only reason why I like Scott Manley is the way he says Space Shuttle. XD

[@dalerbsr.5061]

Thanks for the awesome content, this was a fun escape from the world news!

[@avejst]

Impressive video as always 👍 Thanks for sharing your expirence with all of us 👍 🙂

[@michaelblacktree]

Ah yes, the heady days of rocketry... when satellites recorded images on actual film, and had to return it to the ground.

[@68f100ranger]

You had to have talked with Jay Prichard at the Vandenberg AFB museum. That's the only place you could have gotten some of this juicy footage.

[@jwize386]

Whats that T Shirt about?

[@765kvline]

I've always had a lot of respect for the Thor IRBM. This video is evidence to the fact that it was a reliable and evolutionary vehicle of the first order.

[@cthellis]

Sadly no “Thor Advanced Extensible” variant so we could have gotten THORAX launches.

[@StubbyPhillips]

"I'm so Thor I can hardly walk."

[@rydplrs71]

There’s nothing more permanent then a temporary solution that works. -Engineering 102

[@marshalleubanks2454]

Good program!

[@AlexBakiper]

I would count the japanese N-I and N-II rockets also as part of the Thor rocket family, since they were basically made with different parts of Thor and Delta rockets (and also Castor booster) produced under licene by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. So we can add 7 launches (one failure) for the N-I between 1975 and 1982 and 8 launches for the N-II from 1981 to 1987 to the list. Also the H-I had a japanese second stage, but the first stage was form the Thor-ELT (also 9 Castor 2 SRBs). The H-I launched 9 times from 1986 to 1992 before it got replaces with the full indigenous H-II.

[@tsechejak7598]

Mercury dudes were brave as hell agreeing to ride the atlas!

[@RobSchofield]

Great history!

[@slopehoke1277]

7:17 Ah, so these are the checkerboard-bottomed fuel tanks from Kerbal!

[@darkonc2]

Another example of a quick hack that stuck around for centuries in various forms is the FORTRAN programming language.

[@leeterthanyou]

Love the Oregon trail shirt!

[@marekkozlovsky586]

or The Long Dark?

[@faceplants2]

I just came here to ask what that shirt was referencing.

[@ghostindamachine]

Incredible!

[@alexhatfield2987]

Peerless, fascinating history and assessment of the Thor/Delta series, Scott, ma man.

[@novachromatic]

That Starfish Test Shot story sounds super cool. You should make a video on it!

[@rosswarren436]

We fried Telstar 1 (the world's first active communications satellite) with it only 7 months after its launch. Fortunately, by then it had proven the usefulness of comsats.

[@RCAvhstape]

@@rosswarren436 In those days you were lucky to get 7 months of life out of a satellite to be fair.

[@rosswarren436]

@@RCAvhstape indeed, but some just kept on ticking. Seems the thermal issues were yet to be solved very well. Or the relatively primitive electronics would succumb to the environment. Just glad it worked and paved the way for all we take for granted now. SpaceX launching yet another heavy comsat to GEO or 46 Starlink satellites goes unnoticed by the majority of people.

[@rosswarren436]

@@RCAvhstape and thinking about it, it was lucky to have made it into orbit at all. Those upper stages for the Thor were much less reliable. That "Able" didn't live up to its name too many times. Glad the Agena B and D were better.

[@stinkyfungus]

Early IRL rocketry was so kerbal...

[@stinkyfungus]

Seriously... "thrust augmented thor" = a reliant on a FL-T800 with a couple of SRB "moar boosterz" attached to it

[@the18thdoctor3]

Juno I and II were the epitome of “moar boosters”