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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.
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)
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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.
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.
Actually we're all living inside a giant spaceship, when you get on a plane that air they spray at you from the overhead bin puts you to sleep and they hypnotize you to think you were on vacation. And Eve isn't a real pop-singer, she's just a computer program. Never mind the guy on the transforming motorcycle.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Actually we're all living inside a giant spaceship, when you get on a plane that air they spray at you from the overhead bin puts you to sleep and they hypnotize you to think you were on vacation.
Back in the day on all international flights to Australia, when the plane landed in Oz the hosties would walk backwards through the plane spraying all the passengers with insecticide (well that's what they told us it was)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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.
Now they spray the planes with the insecticide before you board.
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
We're all living on the outside of a giant spaceship. Except for a few people who live underground.
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.
Well, here you go then:
In flight, the cabin pressure was about 3psi. This meant you could make the whole structure lighter. Now, you can't breath air (for long) at 3 psi, it won't have enough O2 in it, so you make it pure O2. Turns out to be about the same partial-pressure of O2 as it is in normal air at sea level. The flame tests they did on materials at 3psi O2 were satisfactory. (Lower cabin pressure also means you don't need to go through a decompression sequence to get into your spacesuit and go EVA, or try to design a one-atmosphere suit.)
Where that all went wrong of course was the plugs-out test where you're trying to simulate the ship in a vacuum when it's really surrounded by sea-level air. One way to do that is to pump up the interior pressure to one atmosphere plus a bit ( I think they were running about 16psi ) so you can check for leaks and such. If you make up that pressure with pure O2 -- which they did -- you're asking for trouble. Trouble like stuff that doesn't burn well in 3psi O2 might go up like a torch in 16psi O2 ... which nobody tested until after the fire. (Or if they did, higher management and NASA didn't listen, kind of like the deal with letting the O-rings get too cold on Shuttle boosters.)
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!
As of 10 months ago, they're still doing it.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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
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
They still do today unless the plane is pre-treated with insecticide. If you get a untreated plane on the route the cans of spray come out.
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...
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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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Now, you can't breath air (for long) at 3 psi, it won't have enough O2 in it, so you make it pure O2.
Why? Is there some reason you *want* to go balls-deep? Why not just make it 50-50 oxygen and air, or whatever the minimum amount the astronauts needed +10% or something?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Well, it was more of a "it's obvious" sort of thing - I mean, sea level pressure is around 14psi or so, so bumping it up +3psi would simulate the conditions. The engineers behind it saw it as "low risk" because on the face of it, it seems low risk - just push the capsule pressure up 3 PSI and you're done, forgetting that oxygen gets more reactive the more you have of it concentrated in a space.
Management signed off on it because the engineers said It was low risk, and many of the safety protocols were bypassed, again, because it was low risk.
It was a simple oversight that really, on the face of it people would assume it would be OK, just someone didn't stop for a second and think.
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