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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."
Spaceflight was so much easier forty years ago...
If I'm reading this right, the Air Force is saying that in the event of a complete failure (ie, the entire thing going to hell all of a sudden) the chances of survival would be zero.
This doesn't really indicate that chances of survival would be zero in all possible emergency abort scenarios.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
The specifics of this issue aside(since I know next to nothing about modeling solid fuel rocket explosions, and two experts appear to disagree, along with a snide comment from a commercial outfit that would probably like the contract for themselves), what sort of safety should we bother shooting for with launch systems?
Obviously, if we have the choice between a more safe and a less safe system we should, all else being equal, chose the more safe one. However, all else is rarely equal. More safety likely adds weight, design time, cost, whatever. How much safety is worth adding, before we get to the "For fuck's sake, dude, garbage collectors die on the job at twice the rate, and being crushed in a dumpster isn't exactly a blaze of glory..." point and live with the risks?
Is there some direct assertion to be made(astronauts should suffer no more than X risk, period)? Should we take an empirical look at the risks of various occupations, and peg the acceptable astronaut risk as equal to that of some similar occupation for which an empirical actual risk value is available? Should we accept very high risks; because astronauts are highly likely to be well informed volunteers who have plenty of life alternatives?
Pushing for perfect is chasing a dream. Deciding what we should be aiming for seems much more relevant.
folks it was built by the LOW BIDDER - what on earth would you expect - the design has been an abortion since day 1 and has had problems with virtually every single subsystem.....
Perhaps the solution is to screw the whole thing (blackjack, the hookers and the solid rocket booster) and to design a proper liquid-fuel rocket?
Ezekiel 23:20
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...
Here's the straight-talk version:
"Welcome to NASA. We're going to send you into space, but this involves sitting you atop something that's basically a big stick of explosives. We're aiming for a controlled burn, and most of the time we get that part right, but as you're probably aware, every now and then something does blow the heck up.
Now, as you might imagine, if you are sitting atop a big stick of explosives, and it blows the heck up, you probably go with it. We're going to try to give you some kind of an out so that the explosives can blow up without you doing the same, but we want you to know it's not really going to make your odds all that much better."
I mean, seriously, folks. People don't sign up to be astronauts without grasping that there's a very real risk of death at pretty much every point in the mission.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
The Air Force doesn't seem to be making a moral judgment.
They're doing what any good scientist or engineer will do: "If you do this, this will happen. I'm not telling you what you *should* do, but simply what will happen if you do it."
That was back in the day when (1) cost was no object and (2) people didn't take (as much) advantage of that blank check.
No, He's a Realist
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
>Racist much?
From Oxford American Dictionaries:
"affirmative action
noun
an action or policy favoring those who tend to suffer from discrimination, esp. in relation to employment or education; positive discrimination."
Yes. Yes it is.
From TFA:
.5% of reality and I will consider apologizing to Mr. Hanley.
/ATK, I'm looking at you.
"But Jeff Hanley, who manages NASA's Constellation program that includes the Ares I, questioned the validity of the Air Force study because it relied on only one example. He said NASA had done its own study, using supercomputers to replicate the behavior of Ares I, that predicted a safe outcome."
Allow me to translate this:
"[...] He said NASA had done its own study, *USING NO EXAMPLES AT ALL WHATSOEVER*, that predicted the results that NASA required for further funding."
Show me that 'the supercomputers' model the Air Force's one example to within
I am incredibly passionate about space flight. The incompetence and political gaming which has produced the fiasco that is the Ares has not caused me any surprise. From the moment NASA decided on solids for a manned vehicle I knew that, without question, the advancement of the state of the art was not going to come from NASA. Ares isn't about space travel. It's about government subsidies to existing aerospace contractors. Thiokol
I also know the guy who's in charge of systems integration for the Ares project. He's a young-earth creationist. I have little faith in the engineering acumen of anyone who can accomplish such a massive feat of ignoring experimental evidence.
Well, I don't know how long it took YOU to experimentally replicate the universe in your high school lab, but MINE certainly took less than 6 days to do.
Have you considered asking him how he reconciles the two habits of mind?
"NASA management has stated that their computer models predict a safe outcome."
-In retrospect, NASA also predicted the safe outcome of the last Challenger launch.
"It's time they you take off your Engineering hats and start putting on your Management hats."
- Famous last words. Unfortunately, with the current disagreement brewing, I think someone at NASA must have uttered those very same words, not knowing what trouble they can cause.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think NASA has all the elements for the Perfect Storm:
1. Underfunded,
2. Overzealous and overbearing management,
3. Overconfidence,
4. Massively complex, high-risk mechanical systems,
5. Career managers making critical decisions, instead of career engineers,
6. Over-valued managers,
7. Under-valued engineers.
Ever notice how when something goes wrong at NASA, it almost always results in a massive, explosive failure, along with several deaths?
Oh well. This conflict will give the networks something to scruitinze instead of endless "specials" on the life and death of some freaky-deeky nutjob pop singer.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
My boss and his officemate were both affirmative action hires. My boss couldn't remember his computer password and called IT every time he crashed WinNT and needed to reboot. His officemate just put his on a stickynote on his monitor. When he got a new computer he had to get me (an undergrad) to make him a desktop shortcut to Solitaire.
That does sound pretty bad.
At one point I asked him how the characterization was going, and he said that the Raman spectroscopy lab was buried under a backlog of debris from Columbia (which was earlier that year). At the end of the summer I had a chat with *his* boss, who told me that there was no such backlog... and then we found all the samples I had painstakingly grown and labelled lying jumbled in the bottom of a drawer of his.
Every summer I end up with a few undergrads doing an internship. My supervisor's boss typically gives him the task of giving the undergrads something to do, with the unrealistic expectation that they're going to do something useful for us. Assuming the undergrads were incredibly smart, there would be no way in hell for them to get trained and have time to do something useful. In a semester or year-long co-op schedule, sure...in a summer internship? No. That's assuming smart people, and that's not often what we get.
So, typically what we do is try to give the students some idea of what it is we do by giving them some task that is representative of the work, but something that we're not going to use. We do that because we don't trust them not to screw up, and we don't want to spend time fixing the screw-up. We don't want to tell them this, however. So we tell them things like, "we'll incorporate your new feature into the software later, but right now we're on feature-freeze." If they ever were to talk to my supervisors boss and mention the feature-freeze, he'd say, "that can't be right, I know for a fact they're implementing new features right now." Truth is, we never intended to use any of the undergrads work, and if we actually want the feature, we'd do it ourselves in 3 days what they did in 3 months. This was about the learning experience for them, and if they were one of the smart ones who actually were catching on quickly, we'll remember them if they apply after graduation.
Basically, what I'm telling you is that the samples you painstakingly grew and labeled were probably never intended to go to the lab. You'd be wasting lab time, chances are you screwed up somewhere. Maybe you're smarter than that, maybe you did everything perfectly right, and that reflects great upon you. Given my knowledge of summer interns, I still wouldn't have EXPECTED you to not screw up, because it's much safer to assume you did. If you ever asked me what the results were, I'd try to spin you a little story so as to not make you feel like you were just doing busy work, but that's for your benefit.
It's amazing that after the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo successes we can't seem to figure out how to make heavy lift rockets. This is nearly 40 years after Apollo was canceled
(Emphasis mine.) You have your own answer. Apollo came after Gemini, which came after Mercury, all in a single decade. And several years of NASA unmanned (though occasionally monkeyed) flights before that. A decade of various missile work before that. And a decade of prior smaller scale work each by Goddard & co and the Naz^H^H^HGermans before that. Every guy working on Apollo had years of prior experience blowing up rockets, senior guys decades.
Since Apollo, you had skylab. A one-off bit of throw away kit. Then a ten year wait after Apollo for the shuttle. Then "Freedom", a 20+ year long program downgraded to the ISS around a Russian core. 20 years, to deliver a single station.
Then, over 20 years since the newest shuttle was built, we have Constellation - Ares & Orion. No incremental development, no learning their "craft", just one design, refusing all criticism, and fuck you if it's wrong.
(And Ares I isn't a first step, it's the first half of a single program. It isn't a training run, it isn't allowed to go wrong.)
NASA's problems aren't lack of either funding or some mythical "Vision" or Kennedyesque "Challenge", nor is it political interference; it's lack of experience. Noone who has been working at NASA&co less than 20 years has been involved with the development of a manned launcher. Not one. Not the designers, the managers who chose that design, not the engineers working on it.
I don't care how high their IQ's, how many PhD's per square mile they have, you cannot expect them to succeed without giving them a chance to build real hardware for ten years, real rockets, real capsules, before they design your final project.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I don't usually reply to inflammatory posts, but it's modded +4 Informative right now and I don't have mod points.
First off, Air Force scientists may be very good, but the fact they gave you a fellowship is hardly supporting evidence. Second, just because someone has a degree from a better university doesn't mean they're more qualified for a promotion. Also, the fact that you posted as an AC and use phrases like "typical ghetto high school" makes me suspect you're not the elite DOD researcher you claim to be.
Maybe the Air Force is a color-blind, apolitical organization and NASA's just a bunch of inept liberals, but this reads more like a rant than a compelling argument.
I may have had excellent karma two weeks ago, but I can tell you that when pro-lifers allow something like this to live (google Juliana Wetmore), It makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
It's as if science is wiping God's ass rather than antagonizing him.
Racism is not a philisophical notion nor a matter of semantics - when we talk about racism we are not talking about "distniguishing between humans who have characteristics commonly associated with a particular genetic heritage". The racism that affirmative action is designed to counter is the generally observed and well established (if in sociological terms rather than biological) pattern of discrimination against visible minorities based on stereotypes that have socioeconomic (and generally classist and xenophobic) components. Affirmative action is an attempt to sever the links between class and race by creating a population of erstwhile "visible minorities" that have all the traits of all classes as a counter-weight to the prevailing stereotypes, thereby weakening their utility, both as shorthand for bigots and as examples for other members of the respective minority. This is a clumsy way to solve a social ill but think of it this way: if you had to start an otherwise fair race against someone who has both a headstart and great confidence that they deserve to win, how fair can the race be? This is about solving a large scale societal problem - getting lost in the bickering about whether affiormatibve action is "racist" is something best left to xenophobic republican racist evangelicals, nto persons of even modest intellect and a modicum of decency, as I'm sure all the Slashdotters must be.
A liquid-fueled, multi-stage rocket and their dragon capsule uses an ablative shielding?
While Ares I is years off, spacex has already successfully tested the first stage of the Falcon 9 and are on schedule for a Falcon 9 launch later this year,
and a Falcon 9-heavy which will be able to do most anything Ares I can do cheaper and safer will be launched in 2010.
Its one company, and one guy running the company with his own money for a hell of a lot less than the Ares I.
http://www.spacex.com/falcon9_heavy.php
Unlike NASA they learn from their mistakes, and dont put politics before safety and reliability.
Also because its liquid fueled you can shut off the damn rocket at T-0:00
Yes they have already launched Falcon 1 rockets and used those rockets as the basis for updating the designs
of Falcon 9 and Falcon 9-heavy
That said a small leak in the solid rocket motor O-ring seals wasn't anything to be alarmed about. The same NASA that said we've seen foam strikes on the shuttle for years without any problems, so don't worry about it. NASA has a problem, too many politicians control nasa instead of "missile men".
Oh please, you can't compare the missed milestones of one program against another program that never missed a milestone because it never started. 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.
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.
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.
I'm sorry, but it's you who doesn't understand.
For a creationist, biblical literalist, or whatever you want to call them, "God made the universe 13.5 billion years old at the moment of creation." is an acceptable answer. Logic and rational thinking ceases to have any meaning ceases to have any merit in an argument with someone who can accept this as a reasonable answer on this point.
My suggestion to you is to not bother yourself. You will not change their minds any more than they will yours.
Space flight needs to get to the stage where it is not dangerous. It should be routine and boring and reliable.
Stick Men
Launching from Florida lets them take advantage of the rotational speed of the Earth -- it's closer to the equator, Earth's widest spot, and just like the outer edge of a record moves faster than the inner part, so it is with Earth. The speed boost is enormous.
Launching from Florida also gives them the ability to ditch into the ocean if necessary, instead of into a city.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.