Slashdot Mirror
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...
Solid rocket motors, however, tend to "go to hell all of a sudden" in a rather spectacular way. "Sucks to be you" is really their only failure mode.
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
Nitpick: The Challenger SRBs were fine. The external tank failed.
The SRBs leaked a bit of fire through the O-ring, and that fire meant that one of the SRBs cut itself away from the external tank - the attachment at the bottom of the tank failed, the one at the top didn't, and that was enough to plow the nose of the SRB into the tip of the external tank.
*boom*
The external tank tore itself apart from the aerodynamic stresses, leading to the big white plume of water vapor. The shuttle was torn apart shortly thereafter from similar aerodynamic stresses.
Both SRBs - even the one with fire belching out of the lower O-ring - can be seen in video of the disaster as flying onwards, well away from the conflagration, relatively unscathed. They were eventually blown up by range control officers.
The root cause of the failure cascade was indeed a problem with the SRB, things did go to hell all of a sudden in a rather spectacular way, and it certainly sucked to be them.
But technically, the SRBs themselves didn't fail catastrophically. Anyone lucky (?) enough to have been riding along in the nose cone of the SRB along with the SRB parachutes (let's assume the presence of suitable breathing apparatus since it's probably not pressurized, the presence of sound/vibrationproofing, temperature control, and of course, a nice parachute for our intrepid stowaway) would have had pretty good odds compared to the Challenger crew... well, at least until range control blew up the SRBs.
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".
I am a rocket scientist. The Orion does have an escape motor. And outside of the range specified in the briefing it gets it safely away from the SRB propellant. The problem is due to it being a solid propellant booster, when you decide to get out of Dodge, you only have three choices: Blow up the SRB at the same time, blow it up shortly after the escape motor lights, or don't blow it up at all. For public safety and some other reasons, #3 is not acceptable. #1 is not acceptable because now you're always going to have flaming debris around the capsule. So #2 is the solution with the detail being how long of a delay. NASA's simulation have determined the most optimal time delay, for their purposes. The Air Force has agreed with that value. But that delay is the time the SRB keeps following the capsule. And it's still accelerating. And it's accelerating faster because it no longer has to push the capsule. This is a problem that can occur with ANY solid propellant choice, so the Direct crowd and NASA's shuttle alternative may also have this potential problem. Only a purely liquid propellant vehicle that could be shutdown immediately on activating of the escape motor could avoid this problem.
From the Air Force's point of view, this would not affect Ares' launch as long as the flight termination system works--Air Force is responsible for public safety, not the astronauts, that's NASA responsibility. Air Force sent their analysis to NASA, NASA (someone at NASA) made it public.
Our founding fathers removed the guys in charge. Be American. Vote incumbents out.
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.