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NASA Astronaut Details Fall To Earth After Failed Soyuz Launch (cnet.com)
After surviving an aborted launch to the ISS, NASA astronaut Nick Hague details his fall to Earth and shares what it was like inside the capsule. CNET reports: In his first interviews since surviving the largely uncontrolled "ballistic descent" back to Earth that followed, Hague told reporters on Tuesday that the launch felt normal for the first two minutes but that it became clear "something was wrong pretty quick." "Your training really takes over," Hague said, adding that he and [Russian Cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin] had practiced what to do in case of just such a launch-abort scenario. Hague also credited years of flight training, going back to his days as a U.S. Air Force pilot.
The escape procedure has been compared to being launched sideways out of a shotgun -- but while the shotgun is rocketing upward. Hague described the side-to-side shaking inside the capsule as "fairly aggressive but fleeting." "I expected my first trip to space to be memorable," he said. "I didn't expect it to be quite this memorable." Because of the combination of rocket-fueled ascent and the sudden sideways escape maneuver, the crew experienced a higher level of g-forces than during a normal flight. Once the Soyuz reached the top of its arc and began to descend, Hague said, what followed was really the same as a normal Soyuz landing, but with one major difference: The pair couldn't be certain where they were. "My eyes were looking out the window trying to gauge where we were going to land." Luckily, the capsule deployed its parachutes and landed on smooth, flat terrain where Hague and Ovchinin were met by rescue helicopters and whisked off for medical evaluations.
The escape procedure has been compared to being launched sideways out of a shotgun -- but while the shotgun is rocketing upward. Hague described the side-to-side shaking inside the capsule as "fairly aggressive but fleeting." "I expected my first trip to space to be memorable," he said. "I didn't expect it to be quite this memorable." Because of the combination of rocket-fueled ascent and the sudden sideways escape maneuver, the crew experienced a higher level of g-forces than during a normal flight. Once the Soyuz reached the top of its arc and began to descend, Hague said, what followed was really the same as a normal Soyuz landing, but with one major difference: The pair couldn't be certain where they were. "My eyes were looking out the window trying to gauge where we were going to land." Luckily, the capsule deployed its parachutes and landed on smooth, flat terrain where Hague and Ovchinin were met by rescue helicopters and whisked off for medical evaluations.
The Apollo launch escape system would also work after launch. They almost used it during the Apollo 12 launch after they were hit by lightning. The mission commander was holding the abort handle the entire time they were troubleshooting the problem. Very cool individual who did not abort when everything seemed to be going wrong, and trusted the ground crew and his shipmates to solve the problem.
Had the Soyuz rocket exploded, which is what happened with Challenger, NO "safety mechanisms" would've helped and they would have died in the same manner.
By impacting water at 200 g after they survived the explosion but had no way to safely get out during the subsequent fall?
It's widely assumed that most—possibly all—of the Challenger crew not only survived the breakup of the orbiter (which, incidentally, was due to aerodynamic issues following the explosion, rather than the explosion itself), but were, in fact, conscious for at least part of the fall. After all, the crew cabin was intact after the breakup, the estimated g-forces involved in the breakup likely weren't sufficient to cause major injury, there weren't signs of catastrophic decompression in the cabin, multiple air packs had been manually activated and showed usage consistent with the amount of time they were falling, and manually-operated controls that would have been relevant to re-establishing power in the event of an emergency had been toggled to non-launch positions.
So, actually, safety mechanisms might have saved Challenger's crew, though those mechanisms would have come at a cost beyond just the money involved, such as needing to reduce crew sizes rather substantially in order to make room for the safety mechanisms.