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NASA's Rollercoaster For Moon Rocket Escape
simonbp writes "NASA's Constellation Project has approved the Rollercoaster Escape System to be used as the Emergency Egress Systems (EES) for astronauts and pad crew to race away from the Ares I pad, should an emergency be called. The Ares I is the first of NASA's new moon/Mars rockets and is scheduled for a first manned flight in 2014." From the article: "An unpowered fixed single-rail system from the access arm level of the ML tower to the existing bunker would be used. The railcars could be enclosed to provide personnel protection. Each railcar can hold four to six people. The rail would follow the ML tower vertically down to the pad surface, then turn and continue close to the ground to the safety bunker. A passive magnetic and friction braking system will decelerate the cars at the tracks end as well as prevent the cars from hitting each other."
Passive magnetic = magnets, with like poles repelling each other
Friction braking = hand brakes
They are keeping it simple, stupid.
You've also got another scenario: big ol' nasty fuel/oxidizer leak. You could hop in a passive (enclosed) car for a 32 f/s/s-quickening ride out to a bunker, or, you could use the ejection method, and light a big ol' ejection rocket right on top of the giant leaking tower of flammable stuff. I think you'd want both options, so that you can react to a range of hazards. If they need to bug out, they'll usually know why... and they may very well not be in the capsule (yet) when they see they need to. For that matter, the pad workers may have the need hours before the crew even saddles up.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The Saturn 5 is going to incur development costs? Its already developed, its old dependable technology, and its relatively cheap.
No, it's not already developed. The blueprints and software have been lost, the tooling to build any of it no longer exists, and the original engineers and machinists are dead or well past retirement.
Not to mention several critical systems like the guidance computer used to weigh multiple tons. Modern units today could be built with orders of magnitude more functionality and safety for orders of magnitude less weight, which means either more useful payload or a lighter propulsion system. Even if you had the original Saturn V stack, the avionics took up so much weight and room, you'd have to do years of engineering and requalification to replace them with modern equivilents. You'd completely shift the weight and balance of the original design.
Overall, it'd take more time and effort to make a modern Saturn V stack fly today than to just engineer a completely new stack with modern engineering and the lessons learned from the last 50 years of manned space travel and avionics engineering.
This