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Early Abort of Ares I Rocket Would Kill Crew
FleaPlus writes "From studying past solid rocket launch failures, the 45th Space Wing of the US Air Force has concluded that an early abort (up to a minute after launch) of NASA Marshall Flight Center's Ares I rocket would have a ~100% chance of killing all crew (report summary and link), even if the launch escape system were activated. This would be due to the capsule being surrounded until ground impact by a 3-mile-wide cloud of burning solid propellant fragments, which would melt the parachute. NASA management has stated that their computer models predict a safe outcome. The Air Force has also been hesitant to give launch range approval to the predecessor Ares I-X suborbital rocket, since its solid rocket vibrations are violent enough to disable both its steering and self-destruct module, endangering people on the ground."
To be fair, the survival rate of exploding space shuttles is currently 0% as well... At least the Ares as a mechanism to even allow for an early abort.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Slide 2 Lower Right "CAPSULE IS HERE"
Feel free to draw your own conclusion.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
I believe you're reading it right. They're not saying all possible emergency abort scenarios. Only those that occur in the first minute of flight.
I think the reason they're being so pessimistic is that any sort of failure during such an early stage of the flight is basically going to result in the range safety officer having to send a self-destruct signal to the rocket which in turn leads to a high temperature debris cloud which in leads to a melted parachute which leads to zero survivability for the crew when the crew capsule slams into the sea.
By contrast, NASA is a highly political organization. It hires on the basis of affirmative action. An African-American with a degree from Texas Southern University (which is barely better than a typical ghetto high school) will be promoted before an Asian-American or a European-American with a degree from Caltech. The quality of reports and studies issued by NASA is quite low.
I'd be surprised if any manned launch system up to now would allow the crew to survive under the condtions specified. Apollo? Apollo 1 killed its crew before even getting off the ground. Probably back then it was better understood by the public that space travel is crazy dangerous.
Some things are not worth solving. We are talking a 1 minute window of issues. With Ares I already at the max load, it makes no sense to add more weight for the escape rocket. That is just part of the risk of being an astronaut.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
You made the exact same comment in comment number (#28744649). Do you have some sort of agenda?
it would be in the Orion coffin, not an Ares.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Also, it helps to understand the AF's perspective here. As safety officers, they may have to be the ones pushing the Big Red Button (TM) if things go wrong. They're just laying things out so NASA knows what to expect. And as others have pointed out, "aborting" a solid rocket launch is... well... about as successful as aborting a nuclear reaction. You don't get to stop things from burning like you might with a liquid-fueled rocket. You just get to watch the remaining fuel get burned up, people on top or not.
The armed services ... promote solely on the basis of merit.
As a former member of the armed services, I find that hilarious.
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
It wasn't the explosion that killed the Challenger astronauts but impact with the sea.
The Range Safety Officer can't let it just crash back to the ground. The stark reality is that in the event of a guidance failure the RSO's job is to activate the destruct system. Although the lives of the astronauts might be lost, the lives of hundreds of people on the ground take precedence. And no, there isn't really going to be time to determine which way the rocket is going. In the time it would take to figure that out, Cocoa Beach could be a flaming inferno.
The Orion escape system is similar to the Apollo setup; that is, a rocket mounted above the crew capsule is, in the event of an emergency, supposed to yank the capsule off with enough acceleration to get clear of any explosion. Of course, there's an upper limit of how much force you can apply without killing the crew, and on a normal launch, the escape system is just dead weight, despite the fact that it's more powerful then the Atlas rocket that put Mercury capsules into orbit, so there are constraints. Obligatory Wikipedia link.
#include <signature.h>
They are not talking about some dumbmass SSgt E-5 cook that, as you say "get above 40% on a nearly open-book history test and time served". He is referring to the civilian scientists and engineering officers in the test, development and design as well as range safety officers. It seems YOU are the idiot.
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Why not just equip the crew capsule with retro rockets?
It is. That's the thing that looks like an antenna on top of all manned expendables, including artists' impressions of the Ares I/Orion stack. The escape tower. It has a bunch of solid rockets (oh the irony) that lift it away from any explosion.
That's not the problem. The problem is they then parachute back through their own debris cloud. Which, in the case of solid rocket based launchers, is on fire.
Escape Towers
Escape Launch Systems
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
To be fair, the survival rate of exploding space shuttles is currently 0% as well... At least the Ares as a mechanism to even allow for an early abort.
Allow me to present a little bit more context. Back in 2004, NASA received several competing designs for lunar launch architectures, most/all of which involved using liquid-fueled EELV rockets. In 2005 the (now former) administrator Michael Griffin came in, tossed out all the EELV-based designs, and focused the agency on implementing his own solid-rocket design which eventually became the Ares I. A big part of the justification is that the EELV-based designs would have "black zones" during which a rocket failure would be non-survivable, while the Ares I supposedly had no such black zones and was therefore the only legitimate solution. Ironically, since that time the EELVs have been shown to have no such 'black zones," while this latest report indicates that the Ares I has a huge black zone which covers the entire first minute of flight. That means that what was thought to be the main justification for the Ares I is actually a huge deficiency.
Curiously, the other main justifications for the Ares I were that it would be finished faster and cost less than EELV-based designs. As it turned out, it's taking far longer than the EELVs were expected to take, and the cost has ballooned by almost an order of magnitude. With any luck Barack Obama will take the upcoming report from the Augustine Commission and end the Ares I program before it does any more damage.
Soyuz. The rocket exploded twice, in 1975 and 1983, and each time the crew survived. See http://www.janes.com/aerospace/civil/news/jsd/jsd030203_3_n.shtml
Rather than investing more in escape systems, it might make more sense to spend the same amount of money making rockets that blow up less...
Well the ones that blow up less probably won't be the same design as SRBs, so they won't be made in the same congressional district as the SRBs so they won't get certain congress critters' approval.
That's my understanding of why they went solid instead of liquid and accepted the resulting vibration problems not realizing that the shuttle has a giant liquid damper on it...
You're thinking small. Why miniaturize the laser, when we could instead enlarge the sharks? -John Searle
It takes a modern computer far less than six days to computationally model the behavior of the large belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter using Newton's law of gravitation.
If you do that, you'll see large gaps ("Kirkwood gaps") develop at radii corresponding to orbital resonances with Jupiter. These gaps take far more than six thousand years to develop.
If you look at the asteroid belt, such gaps actually exist. If the Universe is six thousand years, how did they get there? (No credit for "The universe is young but God wanted it to look old".)
***
There are celestial bodies far in excess of six thousand light years away. Anyone building spacecraft surely ought to know about them.
Then there's the georadiological evidence that I'm not going to go into because it's less applicable to astronomy.
Without that last qualification things get a little hairier.
That's a pretty ignorant remark.
The industrial base for large scale solid rocket motors has shrunken to where there is only one company capable of making the solid rockets for Ares. The same company that makes the solid rockets for the space shuttle - ATK. So I'm guessing there wasnt much of a bidding war between manufacturers since there is only one manufacturer left in north america who does this kind of work...
Likewise it's not like you're getting the dregs with the 'low bidder' on the other systems.
The aerospace industry is so consolidated now, the low bidder doesnt end up being Joe-Bob's Rocket Co. It's pretty much the usual suspects, Lockheed, Boeing, ULA, ATK...
Do your homework, or just be a troll.
This is only the latest in a long line of technical problems with Ares I, to say nothing of all the delays, cost overruns and other management issues.
First, they discovered an oscillation issue from the SRB that could cause damage to the upper stage and the orion capsule. Last year, they found out that with a slight wind gust, the vehicle might collide with its launch tower.
Incidentally, both of these problems and the current one are all related to the SRB. President Obama needs to do the right thing here and kill Ares I before it has the chance to kill anyone.
This AC is unambiguously WRONG about DoD policy regarding affirmative action and equal opportunity.
I normally ignore these racist rants from ACs but since it has been modded up as informative by unsuspecting mods, I will respond in brief.
ALL branches of the military have policy and guidelines in place for recruiting, retainment and training of disadvantaged minorities. This is unequivocal FACT.
These policies and guidelines are open and fully available to the general public:
Army: http://www.aschq.army.mil/supportingdocs/p600_26.pdf
Navy: http://neds.nebt.daps.mil/Directives/5354d3.pdf
Air Force: http://www.e-publishing.af.mil/pubfiles/af/36/afpd36-D2/afpd36-D2.pdf
Marine Corps: http://www.29palms.usmc.mil/base/safety/eo/pdf/EO%20Terms%20and%20Definitions.pdf
Some of these are not the official policy/plans but are official documents that do refer to them. I'm not going to burn up the rest of my Saturday night looking wasting time responding to this AC but hope this is enough for those who might believe there is even a shred of truth to this AC's post.
The fact that so many who have served are not aware of the existence of these policies is a testament to the policies' effectiveness. This is one of the few policy level implementations that the military has done right. By the time promotion boards roll around, it is either transparent or nearly transparent to the board members.
I will remind those that care that the "Military" amicus brief filed by military leaders in 2003 during the Grutter vs. Bollinger (University of Michigan) was cited by the Supreme Court as being one of the strongest arguments in favor of affirmative action in higher education.
GD made a few key mistakes in their attempt to get government contracts. Mostly that they hired engineers instead of lobbyists and spent the money on research instead of kickbacks.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Annnnd that the idea of a capsule that could only be opened from the outside was ideal, along with a 100% oxygen atmosphere, and that properly insulated wiring was a "luxury option". They learned that REALLY fast. But that actually had nada to do with actual launch safety.
Now if you were to compare the launch proven Saturn V rocket to the Russian M2 rockets, THERE is the big difference:
The Saturn V was designed by Werner Von Braun, who found that several large engines were safer, because you could build in redundancies, if one out of 5 motors failed, the remaining four could get the job done.
The N1 was designed by an aircraft designer who had no previous experience building rockets, let alone rocket engines. His solution was to build dozens of engines into it, hoping for the same ratio. Of course, the fueling systems were also flawed. The Saturn V used standard hydrogen/oxygen propellents. The N1 used hydrazine/oxygen, IIRC. Hydrazine is highly corrosive, and as they didn't keep that in mind, it ate through seals like a cop at a donut shop. Whenever it did, the rockets exploded, often during fueling, in which case, anyone on site was eaten alive.
It was simply a BAD design.
Now some stuff that WAS well designed: The spacesuit. That lived on to Mir, through the ISS. A part hardsuit/softsuit, that works very nicely. But frankly, the Soyuz design is best for capsule travel. Simple launch system, simple delivery, simple, carrying capacity. Which is why it's used by two countries.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Speaking as someone who was once in the industry, you don't have to blow up the solid rocket booster. All you have to do is 'vent' it. The way range safety works (or at least how it worked in my day) is that there is a predetermined area that the rocket must stay in during its flight so that if all propulsion is shut off it won't land anywhere where there are people. If the propulsion is still applying thrust, then all bets are off--it could land anywhere including in a crowded city. Thus the destruct system only has to shut off the propulsion, under command when it is noticed that the rocket is heading out of the range safety area. It is burning and thrusting out one end, so blow a hole in the other end or along the side and it no longer has any directional thrust. Solid rocket boosters get a bad rap. They did not explode during the Shuttle disaster. I repeat, they did not explode. Look at the old videos. Because of the O-ring issue, they sprung a leak of flame, which ignited the liquid fuel, which exploded. After the explosion, the now free solid rockets flew off in random directions, after which, I assume, the distruct command was initiated to vent them so that there would be no net thrust, as I explained above. They -never- exploded, even after the liquid fuel exploded right next to them--they kept right on working. Solid rocket boosters are much, much safer than liquid fuel. The only issue is that you can't shut them off. But you can vent them in an emergency which has the same affect.
It doesn't matter how the Challenger actually failed. The shuttle has no survivable launch abort scenarios.
Challenger carried an Inertial Upper Stage booster in an active cradle. NASA provided several launch abort scenarios to contractors and required the contractors to analyze the active cradle's behavior in the abort scenarios to demonstrate that the active cradle would not make a bad situation worse. The Rogers Commission found all of the NASA abort scenarios, such as early separation of the boosters, or an abort to Spain, or once-around abort, would not actually work, and would result in the loss of the vehicle.
Whether you think NASA conspired to cover-up the lack of survivable abort modes, or they just incompetently succumbed to wishful thinking, they will have no creditability until they actually do an expensive full-up test of a launch abort to demonstrate the safety system work. If the escape systems don't work, then NASA needs to re-design the rocket until it does.
Oh please, you can't compare the missed milestones of one program against another program that never missed a milestone because it never started.
Actually, since the other designs used already-existing EELV rockets, there were essentially quite a few milestones already finished.
As for the safety argument, IMHO it's so hypothetical I don't even care. I still don't think anybody knows how safe the shuttle now is, or isn't.
Yeah... it's also kind of interesting how the supposedly safer "man-rated" systems seem to have a pretty similar failure rate to the non-man-rated launch vehicles. IMHO, the only way you can really get a good idea of the safety of a system is through repeated unmanned testing, which coincidentally the EELVs have quite a few flights worth of already.
However, if costs on a program have actually exceeded plans by a factor of 10, I think you have a good argument for developing both in parallel in a big programmatic deathmatch.
Coincidentally, this was pretty much what the original plan was back in 2004: The top two design proposal teams (one headed by Lockheed Martin, the other headed by Northrop Grumman and Boeing) would receive initial funding of $1 billion and compete against each other in an unmanned "fly-off" test of their EELV-based in 2008. Former administrator Michael Griffin was convinced his design was safer/better/faster though, so he tossed out the existing designs (and the whole idea of competitive parallel development) and focused NASA on his Ares I.
loose?
The Russian/Soviet space program has never had a launch failure that resulted in fatalities to crew aboard the ship.
True. Of course, there was the small matter of the 120 or so people incinerated in the Nedelin disaster, but they were on the ground.
When I visited the Kennedy Space Center a couple of years ago, they explained that NASA was extremely proud to never have lost an astronaut in space. Apparently, astronauts lost while on their way to space, or coming back from space, or just rehearsing going to space, don't really count...
Those three were Apollo astronauts. And only one on them had been part of Mercury.
Imagine all the people...
"100% liquid fuel was always the right way to do. Loose the solids..."
When someone says "solid rocket" most people think of Challenger. The problem there was that the rocket was operated in conditions outside of design specifications. Liquid fuel rockets tend to fail when pushed beyond their limits, too. I've certainly seen plenty of footage of both types exploding.
I asked about this question to an actual rocket scientist not long ago. My take was that liquid fuel seems safer because you can control it off after ignition. His response, in part: "Offhand I know of at least several cases of a liquid fuel engine going 'BOOM!' and everyone being surprised." Apparently many of the failure modes don't allow for any warning; it just explodes before you can do anything. Further, reportedly, simply "turning off" a rocket engine in flight is not as simple as it sounds; the dynamic loads are complex, and doing it wrong can cause the vehicle to break-up. He said that solid rockets are typically more reliable than liquids, because of their simple design. Liquid fuel motors are very complex, and thus cost more to make, and to make reliable.
He also described an aspect of flight dynamics: Rockets launched vertically go through two phases. The first is overcoming the force of gravity to get it airborne; the second accelerates it downrange and into orbit. Solids lend themselves towards the first phase, because they have a high trust-to-mass ratio. In the second phase, propellant efficiency matters more, and then liquid engines are a win.
He did say that the choice of a solid rocket for the first stage of Area was driven entirely by time and cost constraints. There's no way NASA could have designed and tested a liquid-fuel rocket motor of sufficient thrust and reliability within the time and money allotted.
Now, this is just one guy's take, so I'm not accepting it as ultimate truth. But he knows more than I do.
I, too, have a rather romantic vision of the Saturn V, but given that it was only launched about a dozen times, I'm not sure how realistic that vision is.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I understand that you are referring to an atomic bomb....but in reality the nuclear rocket can easily be stopped, restarted, throttled, and is self moderating (To the End of the Solar System: The Story of the Nuclear Rocket). It is very unlikely that the nuclear rocket would face this failure mode.
As an aside the specific impulse of the nuclear rockets designed and tested in the 50's and 60's achieved well over 800 s. This is nearly twice that of the ~450 s that is the theoretical maximum of the H2 and O2 solid rocket designs.
In fairness the reliability of the reactor core of the nuclear rocket achieved in the 50s and 60s was not outstanding, but they made incredible progress. Also the nuclear rocket was typically only considered for missions that started in Low Earth Orbit is. As a shuttle from LEO to the moon and mars and such.
Summary of Apollo I investigation: The thorough investigation by the Apollo 204 Review Board of the Apollo accident determined that the test conditions at the time of the accident were "extremely hazardous." However, the test was not recognized as being hazardous by either NASA or the contractor prior to the accident. Consequently, adequate safety precautions were neither established nor observed for this test. The amount and location of combustibles in the command module were not closely restricted and controlled, and there was no way for the crew to egress rapidly from the command module during this type of emergency nor had procedures been established for ground support personnel outside the spacecraft to assist the crew. Proper emergency equipment was not located in the "white room" surrounding the Apollo command module nor were emergency fire and medical rescue teams in attendance. There appears to be no adequate explanation for the failure to recognize the test being conducted at the time of the accident as hazardous. The only explanation offered the committee is that NASA officials believed they had eliminated all sources of ignition and since to have a fire requires an ignition source, combustible material, and oxygen, NASA believed that necessary and sufficient action had been taken to prevent a fire. Of course, all ignition sources had not been eliminated. The Apollo 204 Review Board reported that it took approximately 5 minutes to open all hatches and remove the two outer hatches after the fire was reported; that the first firemen arrived about 8 to 9 minutes after the fire was reported and that the first medical doctors did not arrive until about 12 minutes or more after the fire was reported. Thus there was not expert medical opinion available on opening the hatch to determine the condition of the three astronauts although medical opinion based on autopsy reports concluded that chances for resuscitation decresed rapidly once consciousness was lost and that resuscitation was impossible by the time the hatch was opened. It is clear from the Board's report and the testimony before the committee that this kind of accident was completely unexpected; that both NASA and the contractor were completely unprepared for it despite the amount of documentation of fire hazards in pure oxygen environments. 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. The Apollo 204 accident was a tragic event in the nation's space program. Because of it there has been a thorough analysi and review of all aspects of the Apollo program. Consequently many changes have been made in the Apollo system design, operations, management, and procedures and NASA expects this will result in an improved spacecraft and booster system. The committee's review of the accident found nothing which would make the committee question this expectation. It is the committee's hope that the remainder of the program will be carried out with greater understanding and dedication than if there had been no accident. The total impact of the Apollo 204 accident on the Apollo program is not yet known. In continuing its close surveillance over the Apollo program, your committee will be especially mindful of the impact of the accident on program schedules and cost, and on the effectiveness of the changes in management and operations made by NASA during the past several months.