Early Abort of Ares I Rocket Would Kill Crew 414
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."
100% (Score:5, Insightful)
Spaceflight was so much easier forty years ago...
IANARS but... (Score:5, Insightful)
If I'm reading this right, the Air Force is saying that in the event of a complete failure (ie, the entire thing going to hell all of a sudden) the chances of survival would be zero.
This doesn't really indicate that chances of survival would be zero in all possible emergency abort scenarios.
Re:IANARS but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:IANARS but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:IANARS but... (Score:5, Insightful)
More Broadly... (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously, if we have the choice between a more safe and a less safe system we should, all else being equal, chose the more safe one. However, all else is rarely equal. More safety likely adds weight, design time, cost, whatever. How much safety is worth adding, before we get to the "For fuck's sake, dude, garbage collectors die on the job at twice the rate, and being crushed in a dumpster isn't exactly a blaze of glory..." point and live with the risks?
Is there some direct assertion to be made(astronauts should suffer no more than X risk, period)? Should we take an empirical look at the risks of various occupations, and peg the acceptable astronaut risk as equal to that of some similar occupation for which an empirical actual risk value is available? Should we accept very high risks; because astronauts are highly likely to be well informed volunteers who have plenty of life alternatives?
Pushing for perfect is chasing a dream. Deciding what we should be aiming for seems much more relevant.
Not surprised (Score:3, Insightful)
folks it was built by the LOW BIDDER - what on earth would you expect - the design has been an abortion since day 1 and has had problems with virtually every single subsystem.....
Re:Sometimes /. is so fatalistic (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sometimes /. is so fatalistic (Score:4, Insightful)
Rather than investing more in escape systems, it might make more sense to spend the same amount of money making rockets that blow up less...
Maybe it's just an occupational hazard. (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the straight-talk version:
"Welcome to NASA. We're going to send you into space, but this involves sitting you atop something that's basically a big stick of explosives. We're aiming for a controlled burn, and most of the time we get that part right, but as you're probably aware, every now and then something does blow the heck up.
Now, as you might imagine, if you are sitting atop a big stick of explosives, and it blows the heck up, you probably go with it. We're going to try to give you some kind of an out so that the explosives can blow up without you doing the same, but we want you to know it's not really going to make your odds all that much better."
I mean, seriously, folks. People don't sign up to be astronauts without grasping that there's a very real risk of death at pretty much every point in the mission.
Re:Risk? (Score:5, Insightful)
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."
Re:We used to be so good at this (Score:1, Insightful)
That was back in the day when (1) cost was no object and (2) people didn't take (as much) advantage of that blank check.
Re:The Air Force is right. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Air Force is right. (Score:4, Insightful)
>Racist much?
From Oxford American Dictionaries:
"affirmative action
noun
an action or policy favoring those who tend to suffer from discrimination, esp. in relation to employment or education; positive discrimination."
Yes. Yes it is.
Made up data Real life ( Wait. What? ) (Score:5, Insightful)
"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
Re:The Air Force is right. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Well, I don't know how long it took YOU to experimentally replicate the universe in your high school lab, but MINE certainly took less than 6 days to do.
Re:The Air Force is right. (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you considered asking him how he reconciles the two habits of mind?
Wait For The Bang..... (Score:4, Insightful)
"NASA management has stated that their computer models predict a safe outcome."
-In retrospect, NASA also predicted the safe outcome of the last Challenger launch.
"It's time they you take off your Engineering hats and start putting on your Management hats."
- Famous last words. Unfortunately, with the current disagreement brewing, I think someone at NASA must have uttered those very same words, not knowing what trouble they can cause.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think NASA has all the elements for the Perfect Storm:
1. Underfunded,
2. Overzealous and overbearing management,
3. Overconfidence,
4. Massively complex, high-risk mechanical systems,
5. Career managers making critical decisions, instead of career engineers,
6. Over-valued managers,
7. Under-valued engineers.
Ever notice how when something goes wrong at NASA, it almost always results in a massive, explosive failure, along with several deaths?
Oh well. This conflict will give the networks something to scruitinze instead of endless "specials" on the life and death of some freaky-deeky nutjob pop singer.
Re:The Air Force is right. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
That does sound pretty bad.
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.
Every summer I end up with a few undergrads doing an internship. My supervisor's boss typically gives him the task of giving the undergrads something to do, with the unrealistic expectation that they're going to do something useful for us. Assuming the undergrads were incredibly smart, there would be no way in hell for them to get trained and have time to do something useful. In a semester or year-long co-op schedule, sure...in a summer internship? No. That's assuming smart people, and that's not often what we get.
So, typically what we do is try to give the students some idea of what it is we do by giving them some task that is representative of the work, but something that we're not going to use. We do that because we don't trust them not to screw up, and we don't want to spend time fixing the screw-up. We don't want to tell them this, however. So we tell them things like, "we'll incorporate your new feature into the software later, but right now we're on feature-freeze." If they ever were to talk to my supervisors boss and mention the feature-freeze, he'd say, "that can't be right, I know for a fact they're implementing new features right now." Truth is, we never intended to use any of the undergrads work, and if we actually want the feature, we'd do it ourselves in 3 days what they did in 3 months. This was about the learning experience for them, and if they were one of the smart ones who actually were catching on quickly, we'll remember them if they apply after graduation.
Basically, what I'm telling you is that the samples you painstakingly grew and labeled were probably never intended to go to the lab. You'd be wasting lab time, chances are you screwed up somewhere. Maybe you're smarter than that, maybe you did everything perfectly right, and that reflects great upon you. Given my knowledge of summer interns, I still wouldn't have EXPECTED you to not screw up, because it's much safer to assume you did. If you ever asked me what the results were, I'd try to spin you a little story so as to not make you feel like you were just doing busy work, but that's for your benefit.
Re:We used to be so good at this (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Not surprised (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, everything done by the government goes to the lowest bidder... Then the government spends twice as much to get it working.
Re:Not surprised (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Air Force is right. (Score:4, Insightful)
First off, Air Force scientists may be very good, but the fact they gave you a fellowship is hardly supporting evidence. Second, just because someone has a degree from a better university doesn't mean they're more qualified for a promotion. Also, the fact that you posted as an AC and use phrases like "typical ghetto high school" makes me suspect you're not the elite DOD researcher you claim to be.
Maybe the Air Force is a color-blind, apolitical organization and NASA's just a bunch of inept liberals, but this reads more like a rant than a compelling argument.
Re:No abort? (Score:0, Insightful)
It's as if science is wiping God's ass rather than antagonizing him.
Re:The Air Force is right. (Score:1, Insightful)
Racism is not a philisophical notion nor a matter of semantics - when we talk about racism we are not talking about "distniguishing between humans who have characteristics commonly associated with a particular genetic heritage". The racism that affirmative action is designed to counter is the generally observed and well established (if in sociological terms rather than biological) pattern of discrimination against visible minorities based on stereotypes that have socioeconomic (and generally classist and xenophobic) components. Affirmative action is an attempt to sever the links between class and race by creating a population of erstwhile "visible minorities" that have all the traits of all classes as a counter-weight to the prevailing stereotypes, thereby weakening their utility, both as shorthand for bigots and as examples for other members of the respective minority. This is a clumsy way to solve a social ill but think of it this way: if you had to start an otherwise fair race against someone who has both a headstart and great confidence that they deserve to win, how fair can the race be? This is about solving a large scale societal problem - getting lost in the bickering about whether affiormatibve action is "racist" is something best left to xenophobic republican racist evangelicals, nto persons of even modest intellect and a modicum of decency, as I'm sure all the Slashdotters must be.
Already being done its called the Falcon 9 (Score:3, Insightful)
A liquid-fueled, multi-stage rocket and their dragon capsule uses an ablative shielding?
While Ares I is years off, spacex has already successfully tested the first stage of the Falcon 9 and are on schedule for a Falcon 9 launch later this year,
and a Falcon 9-heavy which will be able to do most anything Ares I can do cheaper and safer will be launched in 2010.
Its one company, and one guy running the company with his own money for a hell of a lot less than the Ares I.
http://www.spacex.com/falcon9_heavy.php [spacex.com]
Unlike NASA they learn from their mistakes, and dont put politics before safety and reliability.
Also because its liquid fueled you can shut off the damn rocket at T-0:00
Yes they have already launched Falcon 1 rockets and used those rockets as the basis for updating the designs
of Falcon 9 and Falcon 9-heavy
The same NASA (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:100%? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh please, you can't compare the missed milestones of one program against another program that never missed a milestone because it never started. As for the safety argument, IMHO it's so hypothetical I don't even care. I still don't think anybody knows how safe the shuttle now is, or isn't.
However, if costs on a program have actually exceeded plans by a factor of 10, I think you have a good argument for developing both in parallel in a big programmatic deathmatch.
Re:The Air Force is right. (Score:3, Insightful)
If the Universe is six thousand years, how did they get there? (No credit for "The universe is young but God wanted it to look old".)
***
There are celestial bodies far in excess of six thousand light years away. Anyone building spacecraft surely ought to know about them.
I'm sorry, but it's you who doesn't understand.
For a creationist, biblical literalist, or whatever you want to call them, "God made the universe 13.5 billion years old at the moment of creation." is an acceptable answer. Logic and rational thinking ceases to have any meaning ceases to have any merit in an argument with someone who can accept this as a reasonable answer on this point.
My suggestion to you is to not bother yourself. You will not change their minds any more than they will yours.
Re:IANARS but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:IANARS but... (Score:1, Insightful)
The article is quite clear about the problem: solid rockets spew extremely hot debris, and during the 30-60 second interval using the escape system means the capsule is descending through incandescent debris all the way down to the ground. The debris will melt or burn the nylon parachutes, so the capsule reaches the ground or water at unsurvivable speed. The escape system is assumed to work perfectly; it's those SRBs recycled from the shuttle design that cause the trouble.
Re:100% (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:100% (Score:3, Insightful)
40 years ago astronauts (and for that matter cosmonauts too) were test pilots which knew that the possibility (or risk) of dying was a part of their daily job.
It was first after the Apollo disaster that dying on the job became politically incorrect... very much because of the media coverage.
Re:IANARS but... (Score:3, Insightful)
[quote]But technically, the SRBs themselves didn't fail catastrophically[/quote]
I would argue that they did just that. The O-ring disintegrated when the SRB was lit, allowing the exhaust to escape from the seal and burn through the support. The fact that the gap was plugged by slag made up of solid rocket propellant was just "lucky" (until it was broken away by wind shear later).
If the slag hadn't plugged the hole the SRB itself would have failed pretty spectacularly on the pad.
Yes, the literal explosion of the vehicle was due to the main fuel tank being broken open, but it was caused by a catastrophic failure of the O-rings in the SRB, due to being lit when practically frozen solid (a condition that the manufacturer advised would be fatal, but were overruled my management).
At no point can you possibly claim that the starboard SRB functioned satisfactorily on that mission - it failed, catastrophically, even though it didn't explode.
It shouldn't be dangerous! (Score:4, Insightful)
Space flight needs to get to the stage where it is not dangerous. It should be routine and boring and reliable.
Re:IANARS but... (Score:3, Insightful)
In most failure modes of a 747, an escape module would be useless
No more useless than on a rocket capable of orbital velocity. In fact your arguments have come up many times before on space programs that seem to "need" theses features.
Since loss of life in a 747 is acceptable given the frequency of accidents (And i think it is), then that is clearly they way we should do it for space. Get the dam rocket reliable enough that you don't need a escape system that probably won't work anyway. Or even worse, it adds extra failure modes and makes the whole thing even less safe.
Re:IANARS but... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm sure a lot more people die in the US country from insurance rejecting their claim than from the hospital not having enough blood.
My sister-in-law works in blood donations at the Red Cross. Typically, they keep a 10-day supply in the Northeast (meaning the inventory would be depleted in 10 days if donations stopped altogether). Right now, they have a 20-day inventory because money is tight with the recession and blood is expensive so the bean-counters at the hospitals and insurance have been encouraging the providers to cut back on the number of transfusions.
But it sure would suck to have government bureaucrats making healthcare decisions.
Re:It shouldn't be dangerous! (Score:4, Insightful)
Because we all know how no one gets hurt while driving a car. Or just walking during winter.
No, but we have made these activities safe enough that they are routine, boring and reliable.
There is no such thing as 100% safe. The only way to guarantee not being hurt by a car, for example, is to avoid them completely. That would be ridiculous.
My point is that NASA doesn't seem to be taking safety seriously enough. Political considerations seem to be more important to them. NASA should be making steps forwards in safety. To do otherwise is simply crazy and morally wrong.
Re:IANARS but... (Score:4, Insightful)
At no point can you possibly claim that the starboard SRB functioned satisfactorily on that mission
But, you did! To wit:
the literal explosion of the vehicle was due to the main fuel tank being broken open, but it was caused by a catastrophic failure of the O-rings in the SRB, due to being lit when practically frozen solid (a condition that the manufacturer advised would be fatal, but were overruled my management).
The manufacturer informed them that using the booster under those conditions would be fatal. They use it. It was fatal. Sounds to me like the booster operated to expectations, at least from your comment. I mean, I know myself that if I was told by the manufacturer of something potentially very dangerous (let's say, a propane tank) that doing something to it would probably kill me, I would expect that if I killed me that I would be liable for my death, at least if it was something unusual. Operating the booster out of spec is unusual. Sounds like manslaughter to me, willful criminal negligence leading to the deaths of seven humans, more ammunition for the stay-at-homers, and a big fucking waste of money to boot.
Re:It shouldn't be dangerous! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Maybe it's just an occupational hazard. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Already being done its called the Falcon 9 (Score:3, Insightful)
Launch #1 failed completely
Launch #2 failed due to problems with the second stage
Launch #3 failed due to less severe errors
Launches 4&5 were complete successes
Do you see the progession here? Failure is treated as a learning opportunity, you learn more from trying and failing than trying once and giving up. In spacex the engineers run the show and the guy paying the bills accepts that.
Falcon 9 rocket engines are revisions of falcon 1 engines which are themselves evolutions of Apollo era technologies, no reinventing the wheel here, just building better wheels
Re:Move the launch pad! (Score:3, Insightful)
Launching from Florida also gives them the ability to ditch into the ocean if necessary, instead of into a city.