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SpaceX Plan To Fuel Rockets With People Aboard Raises Alarm Bells (fortune.com)
Several space industry experts that advise NASA have told the US space agency there are safety risks in a proposal by Elon Musk's SpaceX to fuel its rockets while astronauts are on board. From a report on Fortune: "This is a hazardous operation," Space Station Advisory Committee Chairman Thomas Stafford, a former NASA astronaut and retired Air Force general, said during a conference call on Monday. Stafford said the group's concerns were heightened after an explosion of an unmanned SpaceX rocket while it was being fueled on Sept. 1. The causes of that explosion are still under investigation. Members of the eight-member group, which includes veterans of NASA's Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle programs noted that all previous rockets that have flown people into space were fueled before astronauts got to the launch pad. "It was unanimous ... Everybody there, and particularly the people who had experience over the years, said nobody is ever near the pad when they fuel a booster," Stafford said, referring to an earlier briefing the group had about SpaceX's proposed fueling procedure.
They're going to use the people aboard as the rocket fuel? How do the people feel about that?
Someone wants to change the way things have been done for over 50 years, and all the old timers panic, screaming "thats not the way we did it!" and "get off my lawn!"
With SpaceX's advanced high speed sensor suite they can react faster to problems, unlike those luddite NASA people. This means mistakes can be corrected immediately by the advanced SpaceX technology and the system shut down before any issues. Plus, they are going to add some cameras so they have video feeds of the snipers shooting at their rockets. What could possibly go wrong?
Fueling is risky? Risky like sitting on top of a couple of hundred tons of propellant risky? Or risky like shooting people into outer space risky?
What benefit would there be to fueling with people inside the ship? Would they save 30 minutes?
Either provide some scientific insights, or sit down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Also, anyone think Nasa is the right place to be asking whether Elon Musk can do whatever he wants?
Serious question. Everything about space travel is dangerous. But how many times have the rockets blown up during fueling vs the vehicle blowing up in travel?
I don't know the answer, but I'm sure someone does.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
The Soviets lost a lot of their key technicians by having them hang around the rocket during fueling and tests.
Table-ized A.I.
They may have fueled the NASA rockets before crew arrival, but didn't they top them off continuously up until just a couple of minutes before flight? Is it safer if they only put in a little LOX, or a lot of LOX? Degrees of risk...
...to refuel the Spaceship?
If that's already the case, why not send up an empty Spaceship, refuel it robotically with Tankers, *then* send up the passengers?
It's only one extra trip out of an already envisioned ~3-5 trips that his keynote talked about anyway.
That is all
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Do people in The British Commonwealth still celebrate Guy Fawkes Day
A1: They done fueling yet?
A2: Nah. Boring. Light my cigarette, will ya?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
But that's how warp-drive will be accidentally discovered.
Table-ized A.I.
I wonder how many numbers men are placing bets on if this will work.
at least that way LLoyds will make some money on it going BANG!
So they're only going to use humans named Leo as their fuel? Quick change your name!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The only other way than to fuel the rocket with the crew on board would be to fuel it first and then let the crew board it. The latter would mean that the astronauts as well as pad crews would be near or on a fueled rocket with no way to escape if something goes wrong during boarding the capsule.
If the astronauts board the capsule on top of the empty rocket and the rocket is fueled only when they're safe and strapped in there, there is no point at which they couldn't fire the escape system and get away when something goes wrong. Look at the fueling accident they had: The payload sat up there for several seconds after the rocket was already falling down in flaming pieces. The Dragon 2 LES is within less than 1/10 second at full thrust, pulling the capsule away.
So yes, fueling the rocket with people aboard is dangerous but boarding an already fueled rocket would be even more dangerous.
using people for fuel. What else can we do with the 7B on the planet anyway?
That's also an advantage and why we don't still have computers running at 500khz taking up football fields of area.
US manned spaceflight has been littered with cutting corners for fifty years. So was Russian manned spaceflight, for that matter.
Ezekiel 23:20
"Several space industry experts that advise NASA have told the US space agency there are safety risks in a proposal by Elon Musk's SpaceX to fuel its rockets while astronauts are on board."
This has "bad ending" written all over it.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
...to refuel the Spaceship? If that's already the case, why not send up an empty Spaceship, refuel it robotically with Tankers, *then* send up the passengers? It's only one extra trip out of an already envisioned ~3-5 trips that his keynote talked about anyway.
This isn't about the interplanetary rocket on the drawing board, but about how SpaceX fuels all their rockets. They now use super-cooled fuel for maximum thrust, basically once fueled it either has to take off or be de-fueled again quite soon, it can't wait for long. So either the astronauts have to either be on board, arrive from a bunker real quick and get themselves strapped in or SpaceX will have to modify their launch method. And the latter is really unlikely in general for cargo/satellite launches, so it'd be a manned-only setting and less tested.
They'd still have the launch abort system that could hopefully get them out of harm's way just like a mid-launch problem, but sure in an ideal world it's best not to be around things that can go boom. But principally a construction site would be much safer without construction workers too, the only way to be really sure humans aren't hurt is to not send humans at all. It's a question of acceptable and necessary risk, but sometimes we do give up safety for progress. Lots of people have hurt themselves badly with chain saws, few have done the same with a hand saw. Still not going back for safety's sake.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't recall any manned flight where the assembly exploded during fueling. Not even unmanned spacecraft except maybe in the very early days. Very recently there has been one. SpaceX. I am sure I will hear about it if I am wrong. If I am right, then fueling is safe enough for manned operation. However, that means the crew would have to be strapped in during the entire fueling process. The check list process (other than fuel issues) could be performed while waiting for fueling to complete. I also recall that our Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo crews often waited long times before launch. So, on the whole, the proposed idea makes sense. Except that SpaceX has not demonstrated launch reliability as of yet. I think ULA has made 107 consecutive successful launches. Let SpaceX catch up first. The idea stills seems risky to me and worse when combined with the requirement for cold fuel. What happens if they have to scrub the mission? Does the crew fire off the escape system? Do they wait for the scrub to complete? Or do scrubs never happen in SpaceX land? BTW - I like SpaceX, but lets be real.
With one exception, it's been a while. Now, that one exception was a SpaceX flight last year, so of all the people to want to do this....
Your ad here. Ask me how!
My name isn't Leo, so I'm fine with this.
#DeleteChrome
Soyuz T-10-1, Vostok-2M, Falcon 9, Nedelin disaster, VLS-3 and STS-1 were all major explosions, sometimes killing people on the ground during fueling or other preparations.
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"Low" to an extent. ~95% is low compared to best performers but average for today and also in historical terms. There's also the usual problem of statistical significance given that most rocket families have had very few launches (say less than 100, with the larger numbers going to the ICBM-derived vehicles). This is definitely a problem for comparing, e.g., Falcon to Ariane, which are the two major commercial competitors nowadays.
Likewise, "low" to an extent goes also for the fact that it can't be too low anyway unless the payload is extremely cheap (bulk liquids could qualify, perhaps). That's not the current market focus, though.
Ezekiel 23:20
US manned spaceflight has been littered with cutting corners for fifty years. So was Russian manned spaceflight, for that matter.
The Russians were epically careless, and life in Russia is cheap. They would have crammed a lit stick of dynamite down a cosmonauts throat if they thought any part of him might make it into space that way...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
SpaceX's method is actually safer overall. For Space Shuttle or Saturn 5, the astronauts and dozens of support crew are all in the death range of an exploding rocket. And most of the time, none of them are in a position to escape. The Falcon9 would move everyone back except the astronauts before the fueling occurred and the astronauts are ready for an escape throughout the entire fueling process.
It's funny how after the SpaceX fueling mishap, all we saw in the news was that this was the first fueling accident in 50 years -- implying that SpaceX was the inexperienced newcomer and that it shouldn't have happened. And now apparently it is super risky.
They also fail to acknowledge that the capsule would likely have been able to clear the explosion -- based on the recent test of the escape velocity and as long as it detected the issue soon enough.
Just arrange a discussion group. Get a bunch of slashdot readers onboard and from a suitably safe distance just ask them whether vi or emacs is best. Then just sit back and watch the launch.
That's not what those battery explosions tell us.
Have them sign an NDA...all is well.
Of course you're including the double failure of the J-2 on Apollo 6 with ruptured fuel lines on the second stage, the inability of its third stage to restart, and the failure of the center second stage J-2 engine on Apollo 13 (and maybe others), right? Saturn V was no less of a gamble than, say, the R-7 with Vostok on top.
Ezekiel 23:20
And Americans were not epically careless? The segmented SRBs, the foam insulation, the TPS, the flawed and hurried RS-25 design...examples abound.
Ezekiel 23:20
Why is SpaceX wanting to do this??? To reduce the amount of fuel boil-off before launch?
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Soooo, if fixing-as-you-go is acceptable, then so is SpaceX approach. Good to know! (BTW, the Apollo 13 problem I mentioned was a Saturn V problem. It had nothing to do with the SM.)
Ezekiel 23:20