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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)
~100%?
The Old NASA wouldn't settle for anything less than =100%!
THL phish sticks
They have a burning commitment to the program.
As in, "the Chef is concerned, but the Chicken is committed." :-)
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
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.
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.
The problem is that a parachute with a low melting point enters a region with high temperature particles. Solution: increase the melting point or move the parachute away. IIRC, in the case of an abort, the capsule is lifted away from the rocket by using additional thrusters. If they were allowed to operate for longer, then they would move the capsule further away from the flaming debris.
I have no doubt that the Ares engineers will quickly solve this (if they haven't already).
I worked at Marshall Space Flight Center -- the facility where the Ares is being developed -- for a while as part of an undergrad summer research project. While it may not be polite to say such things, AC's criticism of NASA's affirmative action policies is spot on.
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. I have no idea what that guy did other than order office supplies.
My boss often skipped work to play golf, leaving me in charge of the lab. I wound up growing samples in a gas deposition chamber and giving them to him to catalog and characterize. 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.
While it makes me sad to say it, I've seen Marshall Space Flight Center incompetence with my own eyes. I'm from Huntsville, the city where MSFC is located. When I was growing up Real Science got done there -- my high school English teacher is the guy who built the Lunar Rover. But it's gone downhill.
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.
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.
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.....
Especially for a German. He designed the thing, wound up retiring from NASA, and teaching English in his German accent.
Guy had quite the sense of humor, along with a reputation for being hard as hell. I asked him in the halls one day how many people had dropped dead from his latest exam, and he said "Oh, all of them! I run a mortuary on the side; good way to get more business!"
How much risk is acceptable? Is the Air Force suggesting that space exloration should be 0% risk, or less?
If so, then we should probably ground all aircraft, scrap all automobiles - you get the idea.
Let's face it. Sitting on top of tons of explosive, and lighting them off, is going to be risky. Minimize the risk, yeah, but there will always BE RISK. It doesn't matter what kind of engine you are using, or what kind of fuel it is using. A crash within the first minute of flight is often quite deadly in aviation simply because the pilot has so few options for ditching or bailing out. The same will always be true of spaceflight.
If we want 0% risk, we had better get started on that space elevator. Of course, there may be some hidden risk at some point in that ascent - but at least we won't be blowing it up to use it.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.
it would be in the Orion coffin, not an Ares.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The Russian and us, sans 40 years of "experience." You'd think Challenger would've taught us something about stackable SRBs and people. Or Columbia something about non-melting crew return vehicles.
Oh, I just had an idea! How about a capsule with an ablative heat shield mounted on top of a liquid-fueled, multi-stage heavy lifter?! I know, I know, I'm a genius (and a rocket scientist, IRL, coincidentally).
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.
The survival rate for exploding Soyuz rockets is 100%. It happened once in 1975, and again in 1983. Both times, the crew escaped without major injury. The Russian/Soviet space program has never had a launch failure that resulted in fatalities to crew aboard the ship.
The 1983 incident occurred as the rocket exploded while on the pad, and threw the capsule 6,500 feet into the air, subjecting the cosmonauts to approximately 17g of acceleration. According to popular legend, the cosmonauts destroyed the capsule's voice recorder due to the lengthy string of profanity that it captured during the incident.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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?
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']
hah, how typical, raising a "racist" smokescreen when someone talks how people with no ability are given jobs they aren't qualified for on the baasis of their race in the name of affirmative action. The truth is affirmative action is racist, only ability should matter.
Well, then you should know the answer: Cost.
Space travel has to be cost effective. We're not in the 60s anymore where it was a matter of national prestige, where money was no matter and where nobody would have questioned spending another billion to get our men there before those pesky Reds. And of course we must not lose any astronauts when those Russkies don't. After all, we gotta prove our technology is superior to theirs and much safer, and we care about the life of our men while they risk their life carelessly.
Try to argue it today. Space travel is not a matter of prestige anymore. Anyone can do it. Even "backwater" countries like India have rockets today, being a spacefaring nation is no longer something to show off how superior you are. People accept the need to put satelites into the orbit so they can watch sat TV and have international calls, but putting people up there? What for, leave it to countries that have spare money to blow up.
Yes, it's quite near sighted and many people don't even come close to understanding what technological progess we owe to the space program. A lot of research done for space programs created as a by-product some discoveries nobody would have invested a cent in because of the lack of a direct reward. From metallurgy to propulsion to computers, a LOT was tried and most of it was a dead end, but the remaining pieces are gems that we would not have today. Worth it? Hard to say.
But there's no time and money left for ground breaking basic research. If it can't be turned into profit, it's hard to sell it to the taxpayer these days.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It wasn't the explosion that killed the Challenger astronauts but impact with the sea.
"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."
They dropped your resume on the floor, and didn't even send you a card saying how much they regretted it, didn't they? And the only explanation for that is someone of a more fortunate race also applied. Bless your heart.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
"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....
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.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
Oddly enough that regime was so fond of paperwork that there were weird documents along the lines of "order to destroy all records of the mass graves at lat X long Y containing Z bodies from the incident on DATE" with all the correct numbers filled in. People were so careful to cover their arses that everything was written down (even attempts to duplicate things that had been ordered destroyed) and is now a goldmine for historians. However there is still the garbage in garbage out problem if the information was wrong in the first place.
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.
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.
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'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.
Only Russians could swear while undergoing 17 g acceleration.
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.
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.
Not that I know a thing about rocket science (or the science of destroying them in spectacular fashion) but --IF-- this prediction were true,
could Nasa not come up with an alternative way of slowing the capsule down, such as gliding in some way? Maybe even use shape charges
to blow debree/bits-o-exploding-rocket away from the capsule? -- A bit like fighting (uncontrolled) fire with (controlled) fire..
Again, I don't claim to know anything about anything.. Just typing random thoughts..
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.
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
You mean a Bush appointee came in and went ahead with a plan of action based on a false set of data and discarded all alternatives due to some theoretical, but now disproven, threat to American lives? You don't say...
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".
Back in the ~70s, in the bidding stage of the shuttle program, General Dynamics had some interesting designs for a reusable--- FLYABLE---landed on its own, was piloted--- liquid fueled boost stage for a shuttle... and that proposed version of the shuttle was made of titanium mostly and had about 2X the payload, and far more range, and probably would have cost 1/4 of the final "cheaper" congressional mandated aluminum design.
Perhaps we should dust off some of the designs that lost the shuttle design-off due to congressional interference.
The shuttles concept didn't suck.
The final design did.
(My dad worked for GD back in the day, including at the cape)
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.
The rocket that exploded to cause the Nedelin disaster was an ICBM -- strictly speaking, not even part of the space program.
Additionally, the Russian space program had notable problems with re-entry, safety on the ground, automated docking, off-target landings, or the fact that they couldn't get the N-1 to work at all.
However, we're not talking about any of these things. Russia's launch abort system has proven itself to be successful, and has saved lives in two separate incidents. Although NASA has certainly done a better job of other aspects of its program, its launch abort system has never been used in practice and is conspicuously absent from the shuttle, which is the entire point of this conversation.
Odds are that both uses of the Russian launch abort system could have been avoided by correcting deficiencies present elsewhere in their space program. However, it's certainly nice to have redundancies present in the system. Shuttle missions have to be conducted with outright paranoia due to some of its design deficiencies.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
Why should records which have been verified to be true through comparison with many internal and external independent sources NOT be trusted?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Goodness, I hadn't realized the racist conservative map of humanity was so fucking SOPHISTICATED.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The examples you provide are an on pad failure, and a second stage failure. Both of which are outside the time period of danger mentioned by the Air Force. The NASA system would probably succeed near 100% in those instances as well. With the Soyuz being liquid, the problems with the NASA system (inability to shutdown the rocket without spreading burning propellant) would not be present.
Our founding fathers removed the guys in charge. Be American. Vote incumbents out.
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.
Look at the video from the Delta II failure back in 1997 that happened about 10 seconds above the pad and realize there were people in the blockhouse right near the launch pad. No casualties, but that was the last launch with people in that blockhouse. That early in the launch and I don't think it was 3 mile wide...only 1-2 miles at most.
Our founding fathers removed the guys in charge. Be American. Vote incumbents out.
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.
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.
Of course, most of these comments are made pseudonymously and should be therefore be taken with a grain of salt, but they're still quite interesting:
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/07/ares_doubts_con.html
Sources report that Steve Cook and his team were preoccupied on Friday with the ramifications of this report going public. Several meetings were held on Friday and another was planned for Saturday morning. Lots of finger pointing and asking questions along the lines of "who knew what and when did they know it?" and "how do we respond?" was reported to have happened on Friday. A briefing is being prepared for NASA Administrator Bolden for presentation as early as Monday.
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/07/usaf_orion_crew.html
When people at MSFC tried to discuss this in 2007/2008 "Niki the aborts manager" shut them down and made sure two most vocal left the group.
Space flight needs to get to the stage where it is not dangerous. It should be routine and boring and reliable.
Stick Men
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...
Of course it's socialism's fault! Are you crazy, what else could it be!? And universal healthcare breeds terrorists!
"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.
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.
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.