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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)
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.
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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
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".)
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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.
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.