Galileo IUS ignition Options

[kwan3217]

There are lots of pictures of Galileo being ejected from the cargo bay of the space shuttle, but so far I haven't been able to find any pictures of Galileo when the IUS first stage lit up and Galileo departed for Venus. Is this because there aren't any such pictures?

Basically I want to see what a solid fuel motor looks like when it is fired in space. I suspect it is quite different from the billowing gray smoke we are used to seeing when one is lit in the atmosphere.

[dvandorn]

When you consider that one of the next few flights of the Shuttle after Challenger was scheduled to be the launch of Galileo on a Centaur loaded into the Shuttle's cargo bay, it may not be completely correct that "interim" was a misnomer. There were plans, as of early 1986, to use the Centaur / Shuttle combination for a variety of large payloads, including planetary probes.

Of course, if you talk with Shuttle experts and afficionados, you'll hear the opinion that while Challenger was a tragedy, maybe it was a good thing in one way -- that the systems in place to fly an LO2-LH2 Centaur stage inside the cargo bay were so dangerous that we would have lost an orbiter trying to fly in that configuration. (Just the systems designed to allow fueling of and boil-off from the Centaur stage, IIRC, required major Shuttle safety waivers to be allowed to even be considered for a flight configuration.)

But it's good to remember that while the full "space tug" system was never going to be developed, there were plans to go beyond the PAM / IUS set of capabilities. And, therefore, "interim" wasn't necessarily going to be a completely dead concept. (Up until Challenger, of course, after which even the PAM / IUS configurations were considered too risky and phased out.)

-the other Doug