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The Tragedy Of Apollo 1 And The Lessons That Brought Us To The Moon (forbes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: On January 27, 1967, the Apollo 1 crew was performing a "plugs-out" test of the Command/Service Module, an essential simulation of how the three-person capsule would perform under in-space conditions under its own power. At 6:30 PM, a voltage spike occurred, leading to a disaster. In 26 seconds, everything changed. The Apollo 1 fire and the tragic death of all three astronauts wasn't due to just a single point-of-failure, but rather due to five independent confounding factors that if any one of them had been different, the astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee might have survived. As it stands, all the crewed Apollo missions were scrapped for 20 months while NASA changed how they did business. The changes worked remarkably well, and 2.5 years later, humans walked on the Moon.
Not going to touch that link even with a mouse attached to a 50 foot pole
Nuff said.
Better known as 318230.
The moon landing has been faked, the earth is flat, and the nasa guys watch out that nobody gets to the border of the world (south pole).
And the earth was created 3000 years ago by the one true GOD, and barack obama is a muslim and trump is great.
And no, Mr. Grimes is wrong. The conspiracies are still operating in secret.
There are some areas of exploration that are worth the risk of life and limb, space exploration is up there on my own personal list. As in I'd risk myself in order to go into space, even something as "boring" as a return to the moon. Hell I'd even go on a one way trip to Mars, I'm sure my family and friends would be happy to see me off. (ok only a few would)
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
You and Forbes suck all the oxygen out of the room everytime Slashdot accepts a check to propagate your blogspam and Forbes' malware..
THAT'S why the Soviets didn't use pure oxygen.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Anyone have a cached copy of the original link. The one linked in the article is inacessable to me, in that I will not turn off filtering to access .
That they didn't explain the changes and instead focused on the tragedy. Maybe there's something even better waiting.
but rather due to five independent confounding factors that if any one of them had been different, the astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee might have survived
This reminds me of a blog post from Raymond Chen (The Old New Thing), which I can't find right now.
He argues that most software constantly runs in some failure fallback mode.
So when you hear "this only occurred because 5 unlikely failures happened at the same time, and there was a fallback for each", people ignore that prior to this it might have already been running with the fallbacks for, say, 3 of these failures active all the time. Thus, it isn't quite as unlikely as it sounds.
Project Manhigh happened prior to Apollo 1...and they SPECIFICALLY warned against a 100% pure oxygen environment.
Nice try, StartsWithABang.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
Astronauts HATE these!
I don't care about your ad-light experience. Deal with it. Innovate.
"Capitalist Tool"
sez so right on the masthead.
NASA won't tell you this.
I like to juxtapose two scenes from "The Right Stuff" and "From the Earth to the Moon".
In "The Right Stuff", toward the end, Grissom is grilled about the loss of the capsule hatch that led to the sinking his capsule.
As portrayed in the movie, Grissom claimed the hatch "just blew", while the investigators said the "never happens" and blame it on Grissom fiddling about with his dimes and souvenir space capsules.
In FtEttM, episode 2, they addressed the follow up to that scene. In fact, they did find that the explosive bolts on the capsule hatch could "just blow", and were thus removed from the Apollo capsule. If the hatch did have explosive bolts, then the hatch may have been able to be opened, and the outcome different.
It's a painful thing to watch, frankly, and it always chokes me up.
"Never been a fan of irony."
Never seen a credible explanation why the atmosphere had to be pure oxygen.
When I was a child reading about this, I stopped at "pure oxygen" ...
I never understood how scientists can make such an obvious mistake, any child can spot on the first glance.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Apollo 1
#DeleteChrome
I know a retired NASA engineer who was in the control room that day.
35 years later, when I met him and heard the story, he was still moved to tears by the tragedy of that day.
What about Apollo 13 and two shuttles?
Look, NASA is (or was in the past) engaged in a dangerous business called manned space flight, where you can die in horrible ways from a nearly endless list of causes, but it has a history of great success punctuated by some breathtakingly stupid failures. It seems NASA has to keep learning the lessons of Apollo 1, Apollo 13, Challenger and Columbia. There will be more, they will be caused by stupid mistakes made by people who should know better. I'm not so sure NASA, or more to the point the people who work there, have really learned the lesson of Apollo 1.
But it's really the history of the human condition. We routinely get complacent with the risks we face every day and take stupid chances as a result. NASA is made up of humans, who suffer from the same flaws as the people who made the errors that got us Apollo 1. Mistakes will be made in the future, unnecessary risks will be taken and people will die as a result. I just hope the organization can keep these things to a minimum...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Not going to touch that link even with a mouse attached to a 50 foot pole
The article is a fluff piece. I read through it hoping that I learn about "The Lessons That Brought Us To The Moon". But what were the lessons? The article never explains any concrete changes in the way that NASA was operated, except to say that they became "Tough and Competent". I have another word to describe the article: platitudes.
Challenger
Forbes' bullshit website went in my hosts file when Slashdot started steering posts there. It's basically killed half of the posted content on Slashdot.
Way to step on your own dick Slashdot! If you actually worried about your viewership you wouldn't steer us to that crap.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I was a 7 year old who was in love with the space program. Watched every launch from John Glenn through the shuttle. The weird thing about that whole mess, and the ironic nature was what happened to Grissom's Mercury flight. Up until the Apollo missions, the hatch opened OUTWARD. On Mercury, there was a button that the user would punch with his fist, that would activate explosive bolts to blow the hatch. Grissom's flight splashed down, and the hatch "just blew". Speculation was that Grissom wiggled around, got scared or something an hit the button, causing the capsule to take on water & sink. After that, they figured it would be better to have an INWARD opening hatch. Also, to simulate the take off, the "plugs out" test, the cabin pressure was tanked up to around 22psi of PURE O2. The used pure O2 back then, because they were worried about them getting the bends & they didn't want the added weight of a nitrogen tank. Also, since everything floats, they had YARDS of Velcro all over the place. I remember watching a test. Normal air, pressurized and igniting velcro. Nothing happened. Then the pure O2 pressurized, and the spark caused the whole thing to catch fire. Pure pressurized O2, LOVE flames along with the flammable Velcro. With the dual hatch design, the inner hatch pressurized outward, once the fire started, the hatch sealed tighter & tighter, making it impossible to open, until the safety valves popped open. By that time, they had been overcome by smoke, lack of breathable air, and had been asphyxiated. I remember the days after, and the funerals. Sad... A few years ago, they found the Mercury capsule of Grissom's, and took it to the Kansas Cosmodrome in Hutchison, Ks. After cleaning it up, they found out that the hatch "just blew" as Grissom had claimed all along. The switch was still in the off mode (it was a one way switch). Also, every Mercury astronaut had a distinctive red spot/bruise on their wrist, where they smacked that button (it required a LOT of force). Grissom had NONE. Had that hatch not "just blew", who knows...that fire might have allowed them to blow the hatch and escape. One positive outcome was it changed the mindset at NASA. They had "go fever" and finally put on the brakes, took a look at what they were doing and had a change of attitude. Gene Kranz, after the fire wrote two words on a blackboard, to NEVER be erased..."tough & competent". He & Kris Craft redid how mission control was run, and they never had an issue. Even when Apollo 12 was hit by lightning, or when the Apollo 13 explosion happened, they did what he always dictated, WORK THE PROBLEM. A lot of good came out of that tragedy
Why are you "chomping at the bit" to get this story posted? At least you could wait until next January 27th and say "Today is the 50th anniversary ..."
Even better if they boycotted all sites which block ad-blocking viewers, ...
If you're blocking ads, you don't contribute to their revenue, but do contribute to their resource consumption. So the operators of such sites would RATHER be boycotted by people using ad-blockers.
Sounds like a win-win. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The Appollo I martyrs are heroes in more ways than one.
One of NASA's responses to the fire was to design a detector for miniscule amounts of smoke particles, to provide an early warning of electrical problems that might lead to a fire - in time to evacuate the capsule if on the ground or hunt down and fix the problem if in space.
The detector used a miniscule amount of radioactive material to ionize the smoke particles and then detected the current conducted by the ions. (Radioactive materials were for NASA, a government agency, to design with, difficult for random inventors or corporations to even consider.)
The first, space-rated, low-volume prototypes were pricey. But the circuitry and the detection chamber were dog-simple and could be dirt-cheap when manufactured in volume.
So this was plowshared, and became the ionization-type smoke detector, the first practical, affordable, smoke detector suitable for broad deployment in residences. Even when this was the only type in use, it was quickly saving, first hundreds, then thousands of lives per year.
Modern detectors, combining ionization and photoelectric mechanisms, are credited with cutting the death toll from fires by somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2. They detect different types of fires, and the one detected by ionization accounts for somewhat less than half of them - which is still an enormous number.
So the loss of those three lives has been repaid with enormous interest in the decades that followed. The benefits are still flowing.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's a shame self-righteousness prevents some from reading an otherwise interesting article. If you're relying on AdBlock as a way to prevent malware, then you're in for a world of hurt.
Yes. Shuttle astronauts had to spend time decompressing before space walks, because the suits used "pure" oxygen at low pressure rather than the "earth normal" 80% nitrogen atmosphere in the Shuttle.
They can't build a suit that stays flexible at 14-15 PSI.
Sounds like you are getting your science from celebrities like B.o.B. who has been arguing about the Earth being flat with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Ah well, if you are going to get your political views and climate views from actors and musicians, then why not turn to them for physics, astronomy, celestial mechanics, etc?
Surely, the court jesters (entertainers) of our society are the people we should listen to for wisdom and intelligence, right?
The Russian program did indeed kill a cosmonaut rather horribly when alcohol-soaked swabs ignited in a pure O2 chamber on the ground - a sad tale people interested can now read about in the post-cold-war era where info from the old Soviet Union can be obtained. It is, however, all-too-often used on the internet now to imply that Americans were arrogant and not willing to learn from the obviously-smarter Russians. First, the Russians were clearly proven not smarter by the very fact of the accident; BOTH nations were climbing a steep learning curve and paying the price along the way. Second, US insight into the closed-society of the Soviet Union and their program at the time was very poor; so poor that the CIA grossly misjudged the N-1 rocket and completely misjudged the performance it would have had had it succeeded (they thought the fuel and oxidizer tanks were shaped to match the outer mold line).
The more obvious disaster that NASA missed and that could have informed them better was a disaster in a US Navy lab that killed with fire in pure oxygen... and THAT requires no leaps into the post-modern garbage meme that the cold war was a stupid face-off between two equals who simply refused to listen to each other and were trying to out-manhood each other.
Both needed a villain/bad element to have spicy elements for a story for a pop-culture entertainment success. Sadly, I have always thought their choice was evil and a great abuse to a great American who was not there to defend himself.
1. Gus was well-respected in NASA and with his peers... you don't get to that level being the guy portrayed in "The Right Stuff"
2. Wally, an excellent engineer, never believed Gus was to blame and set out to prove it; on his later flight, Wally intentionally blew the hatch in the manner would have IF Gus had don it... and Wally suffered injuries Gus never displayed. Wally, to the end of his life, insisted there was NO WAY that Gus panicked and blew the hatch.
3. Had NASA every doubted Gus, we would know it. How? Study Scott Carpenter. When NASA had a "hero" astronaut who it felt had not performed optimally, their solution was to quietly not insert them into the flight rotation again and not put them in charge of critical elements. Gus, on the other hand, was given so much responsibility on the next program, that the Gemini capsule was nicknamed the "Gus-mobile". Gus provided so much feedback to the team at McDonnell that the Gemini ended-up nearly tailored to him, and other astronauts loved to fly it because it was so much like a fighter jet in many ways. Gus was assigned to fly the first manned Gemini with then-newbie John Young. After the Gemini program, Gus was then assigned to command the first manned Apollo. Conclusion: NASA had absolute confidence in Gus and his having NOT panicked and blown the hatch.
There's a LOT to like about the film "The Right Stuff". The acting is great, and it does a great job of helping young people who've grown up with jets and space shuttles and the internet ans iPads to understand the look and feel of the fifties and early sixties and the start of the "space age". But I cannot watch it without getting angry about the nasty slander of Gus Grissom - a completely unjustified abuse of a man more heroic than most of the jerks Hollywood holds out to youth as "heroes".
It seems that maybe someone at Slashdot has heard our complaints. Unlikely though. It would appear StartsWithABang is now advertising his shitblog anonymously rather than logging in.
I assume someone at DiceDot thought we wouldn't notice.
The real question is: With so many intelligent analyses of what went wrong with Apollo 1, why would anyone want to get information from some shitty advert infested for-profit blog that is spammed around sites who don't really care for the writer's shit?
http://arstechnica.com/science...
Adblock and Incognito friendly.
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
Thanks to Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia, and all the other astro- and cosmonauts whose sacrifices are to help get us out of the cradle.
DaveyJJ
WTF is happening with forbes' cutesy Quote of the day cock blocker page?
Isn't it just a ploy to entertain the visitor while a gazillion trackers are initialised, all his cookies are raped, and browsing history is auctioned off to highest deci-cent bidder?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
At least it's not Bennet Haselton.
I'm not sure which bandwagon you're expecting us all to jump on. Is it the one where we all start to blindly bash the Forbes website, or is it the one where we all get to act like a bunch of fucking crybabies that don't want to see advertisements.
I knew someone down on Merrit Island a few years ago. He had *worked* as a tech on the Cape during the Moon Race. Or, well, he did, until Apollo 1. The astronauts were coming for the tests, and he argued with... I think it was Grissom, he told me, and that he told them it wasn't safe, and they wanted to do some more work on the capsule, and Grissom went all macho on him... and he punched Grissom.
My acquaintance was asked to resign.... Now, if they'd listened to the freakin' techs....
mark
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_detector mentions none of this.
You're right, it's bogus.
I was told that decades ago. But a little research (in the online patent databases) shows that there were ionization smoke detectors for decades before that (back in the tube era, even, when beta emitters were easily available to the common man). NASA says their only involvement with smoke detector design was (in collaboration with Honeywell) coming up with a variable-sensitivity design to stop annoying false alarms in Skylab.
Sorry to have repeated a myth. B-b
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way