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Apollo 1
Last year we looked at the Challenger. This year: Apollo 1. On January 27, 1967, the three-man crew of Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White who were in training for the first Apollo flight were asphixiated in their capsule during a training exercise. The men reported communications glitches prior to the disaster, and it is believed that a spark in their pure-oxygen atmosphere quickly started an unstoppable blaze, consuming the many flammable components in the capsule. There were three hatches between the men and the outside of the capsule, which were not designed to be opened in less than 90 seconds. In addition, it is doubtful that the astronauts could have opened the internal hatch at all since pressure inside the spacecraft rose rapidly after the fire, exceeding the capacity of the pressure-equalization valves. Future designs were modified to remove most of the flammable components from the crew area and include a new quick-opening hatch. NASA has a retrospective.
Yes they asphyxiated. Their deaths were caused by the inhalation of the fumes from the burning surfaces in the capsule. The only part of their bodies that were burned were the exposed surfaces (hands, faces) under their suits they were completely unscathed.
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Striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap, will be the leap ho
The reason the hatches took no less than 90 seconds to open is because NASA wanted to prevent another Liberty Bell 7 incident (MR-4) where the hatch supposedly blew off prematurely.
You're referring to explosive hatch bolts -- but modern journalists have speculated that a pad leader would not have have allowed an explosive bolt system to be armed during an apparently safe countdown test. The more serious design flaw in the hatch was the fact that it opened inward -- a tradeoff to save weight since the cabin pressure kept it closed, but which sealed the astronauts inside when the fire broke out.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
what many of you that are commenting on are failing to realize is that you are using your perspective of "today" and not from that time. My dad was part of the apollo project and specifically was part of the accident and redesign team that focused on all aspects of the electrical system. I had the fortune to visit the launch pads and facilites in florida where he worked shortly before he passed away. The hatch may have prevented them from getting out, but fire in the capsule was not considered a possibility at that time. It was an engineering choice. After the accident they went through the entire design, testing, production phases and made significant changes on everything. the cause was a short in the oxygen panel in a rarified oxygen atmosphere. It was a flashfire that they could not have escaped even if they could have My dad was very proud to have helped to redesign the entire electrical system, but he also pointed out that they (engineers) took the time to go through every system on the entire craft. All the engineers took the acident personally and went out their way contribute to the improvements. It was a time of unknowns and great challenges and shows the quality of the human spirit in the face of adversity.
Actually, the pressure differential is correct in your explanation. The capsule doors were built to open in space, where the outside pressure would be close to 0 and the inside pressure would be close to 1ATM, however, that same fact is used to actually keep airplane doors from opening at high-altitude. The fact is that they are built in such a way that a higher pressure inside than outside makes it harder to open the doors. A lab door is not really as relevant in this arguement.
The committee can only conclude that NASA's long history of successes in testing and launching space vehicles with pure oxygen environments at 16.7 p.s.i. and lower pressures led to overconfidence and complacency
North American was told that the CM would be pressurized at 5psi pure oxygen, which was true during flight. It was fireproofed to these specs. Nobody informed them that launch pressure was sea level. The CM was definitely not fireproof at that pressue.
I believe the reason was the same that deep sea divers use pure O2, it was to prevent the bends
Not quite. Divers almost never breath pure O2 in the water. Oxygen under pressure is toxic, and can cause seizures (bad when you're under water). The only exception to this would be what's called an oxygen rebreather. It's a closed circuit breathing system using pure O2. CO2 is scrubbed out with a chemical absorbant. The main feature of these systems is no exhaust bubbles. They were popular with military frogmen for sneaking into harbors and the like during WWII and sometime after, but they could only be 'safely' used shallower than about 30 feet. Deeper than that is asking for trouble.
Nowadays closed circuit breathing systems use mixed gases for breathing and computers to maintain the proper O2 proportion.
When divers do breath pure oxygen is out of the water in a decompression chamber. The idea is to 'wash' (not really what's happening, but the simple way to expain it) the nitrogen out of the divers tissues quicker than breathing air which is 80%+ nitrogen. It's not so much to directly prevent decompression sickness as it is to shorten decompression times.
Fire is always a big concern when doing this, minimum combustibles in the chamber, absolutely no grease or oil on anything and usually special breathing masks that dump the exhaled gas outside the chamber. I used to be in that biz.
Tog has an excerpt of the Challenger chapter of that book:
http://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html
I think what you forgot is that the Soviets had the chance to really take a step closer to a moon mission had the Soyuz 1 mission worked. Unfortunately, the Soyuz 1 capsule suffered all kinds of system failures during its flight, which resulted in a re-entry that resulted in a tangled parachute line. This caused the capsule to literally crash into the ground, killing the cosmonaut on the flight.
The Soviet moon program never really recovered from that tragedy, because the a derivative of the Soyuz spacecraft was to have flown to the moon. Realizing its limitations, the Soviets decided to use Soyuz as an Earth-orbiting spacecraft, which has worked well to this day.