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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.
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. Poor Gus Grissom was apparently not intended to make it out of the space program alive.
I am a meat popsicle.
Every astronaut that has ever been KIA has had buerocratic imcompetence to blame. There have been two NASA tragedies: Apollo 1 and challenger. In the case of Apollo 1, NASA was too lazy to use a proper atmosphere: "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.". In challenger, the O-ring manager knew very well that they were likely to rupture and demanded that the launch be scrubbed, but was overruled by his ignorant superiors. It seems to me that astronauts are alot more likely to be killed as a result of someone else's incompetence than their own. They certainly deserve the accolade of bravery since trusting others takes alot more of it than trusting yourself.
I always think of this from Heinlein...
"I pray for one last landing
On the globe that gave me birth;
Let me rest my eyes on the fleecy skies
And the cool, green hills of Earth."
"I drank what?" - Socrates
I used to work for the company that made some or all (don't know which) of the wire in the Apollo module. At one point, it was suggested that our wire caused the fire: the insulation was said to flow under pressure, thus becoming thin and allowing for a spark. All that was required was that the wire be stretched across a hard, rather sharp edge. Our company lived in dread of bad publicity, and we talked of the charges in hushed tones only. There was a very unpleaeant feeling associated with any mention of the topic...not because people died, but because the bigwigs were afraid of being blamed. Some insulation flows under pressure, some does not. Wrong insulation for that wire? If so, who chose the insulation? There is a strong tendency both to place blame on someone and to do all you can to cover your behind.....that sort of "It was not my fault, he did it" attitude was the company's motto. I hated working there.
I still have an empty spot on my heart, both for the crew of Apollo 1 and the Challenger. My father worked for NASA during the space race up until 10 years ago. I was neat getting the 8x10 publicity pictures for reports, the walls, etc.
... but think about it.
Even though I'm an old poop now, I still keep a few hanging, and one wall, is the crew of the Apollo 1 to remind me not to take things for granted.
Yeah, I know, I sound like a big wuss
In spite of this tragedy, we still managed to put a man on the moon with little more than vaccum tubes and slide rules !
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Actually, you're wrong. The consensus view is that they died of suffocation, not bruning to death. Yes, they were in a fire, but they were also in space suits designed to protect them from the extreme heat of the sun in space (it gets a hell of a lot hotter out there than it does here, thanks to our atmosphere.
It wasn't just a design fault. It WAS, as you mention, a ridiculous test to put such a high concentration of O2 in the capsule. Much higher than it would ever receive in-flight.
Still it was part of the price paid to advance the space program. As the saying goes, and I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, but to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs. Going into space is/was, and probably always will be, to some degree, a dangerous endeavor. Just as going into submarine is inherently dangerous.
In the case of a submarine the danger is always implosion. In the case of space, it's explosion. Space is also inherently more dangerous because of the types of fuels involved and the lower degree for margin of error.
Anyway, the only design flaw, in regards to your post, was an overuse of velcro, which happens to be quite flammable, especially in a high oxygen atmostphere. The other flaw (the O2) level, wasn't a design flaw, it was a "execution" (for lack of having the proper vocabulary on hand) flaw.
I think there were two issues that led to the disaster of Apollo 1:
1. There was WAY too much exposed combustible material inside the capsule. Even if the atmosphere inside the capsule during the test sported a gas mix similar to regular air if a fire broke out it would have been extremely difficult to douse the fire.
2. The fact the atmosphere was close to pure oxygen meant that if a fire broke out it would have burned with extreme ferocity.
That was why by the time Apollo 7 flew in October 1968 the entire capsule owed almost nothing to the original capsule design--all the combustible material were replaced by fire-retardant equivalents and the gas mixture on the launch pad was equivalent to air, which slowly changed to pure oxygen by the time the Apollo CSM was in orbit.
What was not known to the Americans was in the early 1960's during a series of tests to develop Soviet manned space vehicles a fire broke out in a test space capsule design with a cosmonaut in it when it was filled with pure O2--the cosmonaut burned to death.
And that's perhaps the most bitter irony of the Challenger disaster: We set our sights lower, but we couldn't eliminate the risks. It seems that people draw one of two conclusions from accidents like Apollo 1 or Challenger:
Obviously, I fall into the latter camp. What is so depressing about the loss of the Challenger crew, in contrast to the loss of the Apollo 1 crew, is that, due to loss of vision and scaled-down expectations, the Challenger crew gave their lives for a program less audacious, less worthy, of the sacrifice than Grissom, et al. This is not meant to denigrate that sacrifice but to lament the reduced times in which we live.
In any event, let us all spend a moment in memory and thanks of these pioneers who gave their all for a vision of the human spirit and its dignity. Ad astra per aspera indeed -- but we will get there.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Richard Muller at Berkeley used lunar soil gathered by the Apollo astronauts to demonstrate that impact cratering significantly increased around 500 million years ago. Moreover, the craters appear to cluster around every 26 million years (last cluster occured 13 million years ago.)
Muller hypothesized that the periodic cratering is due to a star that orbits the sun. Every 26 million years, it comes swinging closer into the sundragging debris from the Oort cloud. Some of that debris ends up hitting either the earth or the moon.
500 million years ago is referred to as the Cambrian explosion because the fossil record shows a huge proliferation of different species. There have been a number of hypothesis as to what precipated the increase in life forms and Muller's data does an excellent job of supporting comet/asteroid impact. There's more at Lawrence Livermore
It may be that the Apollo program has yielded a significant clue as to why we aren't all just a bunch of jellyfish.
I had a simulation subcontract from NASA in 1966. I needed data on the characteristics of the ventilation control valve in the Apollo Command Module which allowed the crew to breathe module-supplied air or their suit's air (IIRC). My employer's contact man at the MSC had a great deal of trouble chasing down these data. He finally found them two hallways away from a man who should have had the data. He estimated that he had saved NASA two weeks from their normal data handling methods in getting that valve data to the right engineer.
I told my wife afterward that I thought the people at the MSC would wind up killing someone.
When the account fo the horrible pad accident was published, I felt sick about it; not because I could have done anything that might have prevented it, but because there was nothing I could do despite my offhand conviction.
Here is a quick link to one of NASA's sites that talks about some of their product spinoffs. Not a lot of details, but interesting.
I said it'd give space a run for its money. But, in space, in addition to the issues of pressure differential, no possibility of real rescue, etc. you can add in: radiation (both regularly dangerous amounts and storms), gravity (or lack thereof) which does everything up to and including inducing an AIDS like drop off in the human immune system as well as causing erosion of bone density, and heat issues (how to dispose of heat is a main concern because disposing of heat generally means disposing of some mass at the same time).
Don't get me wrong: The sea floor is a very demanding environment. It is the best place we have on earth to train for space (not the same challenges, but the same degree of risk almost). But it doesn't quite have the cornucopia of threats (sudden and gradual) that space has, some of which (such as the gravity issues) are very hard to deal with effectively.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."