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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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
Have you considered asking him how he reconciles the two habits of mind?
It wasn't the explosion that killed the Challenger astronauts but impact with the sea.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
We don't know how to make it safe or routine yet. In my mind, that's justification to spend the money and figure it out. Unfortunately, too many people think high-efficiency engines, advanced lightweight structures, and durable thermal protection systems just materialize from thin air at some unspecified date in the future, and therefore we should just sit back and do nothing till they appear.
It doesn't work like that. Reliable, cheap space access doesn't just happen. You need to work on it first, and too many don't understand that.
Imagine if, in 1909, the world had collectively decided to stop building new airplanes and just wait until something like the 747 came along. We sure wouldn't have reliable aviation.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.