[multiweb (Marc)]

Tree clearing.

But detonation traps aren't always the complete answer. We dis- covered that when, in the summer of 1960, we tried to fire a 10,000- pound thrust Cavea B motor. We didn't have Mike's trap at that time, so we inserted a battery of sixteen 0.25-inch loop traps in the line. Well, through a combination of this and that, the motor blew on startup. We never discovered whether or not the traps worked —we couldn't find enough fragments to find out. The fragments from the injector just short-circuited the traps, smashed into the tank, and set off the 200 pounds of propellant in that. (Each pound of propellant had more available energy than two pounds of TNT.) I never saw such a mess. The walls of the test cell—two feet of concrete—went out, and the roof came in. The motor itself—a heavy, workhorse job of solid copper— went about 600 feet down range. And a six-foot square of armor plate sailed into the woods, cutting off a few trees at the root, smashing a granite boulder, bouncing into the air and slicing off a few treetops, and finally coming to rest some 1400 feet from where it started. The woods looked as though a stampeding herd of wild ele- phants had been through.*