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."
Sometimes /. is so fatalistic (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that a parachute with a low melting point enters a region with high temperature particles. Solution: increase the melting point or move the parachute away. IIRC, in the case of an abort, the capsule is lifted away from the rocket by using additional thrusters. If they were allowed to operate for longer, then they would move the capsule further away from the flaming debris.
I have no doubt that the Ares engineers will quickly solve this (if they haven't already).
Re:The Air Force is right. (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked at Marshall Space Flight Center -- the facility where the Ares is being developed -- for a while as part of an undergrad summer research project. While it may not be polite to say such things, AC's criticism of NASA's affirmative action policies is spot on.
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. I have no idea what that guy did other than order office supplies.
My boss often skipped work to play golf, leaving me in charge of the lab. I wound up growing samples in a gas deposition chamber and giving them to him to catalog and characterize. 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.
While it makes me sad to say it, I've seen Marshall Space Flight Center incompetence with my own eyes. I'm from Huntsville, the city where MSFC is located. When I was growing up Real Science got done there -- my high school English teacher is the guy who built the Lunar Rover. But it's gone downhill.
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.
Ares Rocket less safe than a Space Shuttle? (Score:2, Interesting)
How did NASA (Need Another Seven Astronauts) manage to make a replacement for the Space Shuttle that is actually more dangerous to the crew than a Space Shuttle with loose heat absorbing titles or malfunctioning O-Rings?
Was this "design flaw" in the Apollo series and the public was not made aware that aborting an Apollo rocket would kill the crew 100% guaranteed?
Risk? (Score:5, Interesting)
How much risk is acceptable? Is the Air Force suggesting that space exloration should be 0% risk, or less?
If so, then we should probably ground all aircraft, scrap all automobiles - you get the idea.
Let's face it. Sitting on top of tons of explosive, and lighting them off, is going to be risky. Minimize the risk, yeah, but there will always BE RISK. It doesn't matter what kind of engine you are using, or what kind of fuel it is using. A crash within the first minute of flight is often quite deadly in aviation simply because the pilot has so few options for ditching or bailing out. The same will always be true of spaceflight.
If we want 0% risk, we had better get started on that space elevator. Of course, there may be some hidden risk at some point in that ascent - but at least we won't be blowing it up to use it.
Re:That's OK... (Score:4, Interesting)
The Russian and us, sans 40 years of "experience." You'd think Challenger would've taught us something about stackable SRBs and people. Or Columbia something about non-melting crew return vehicles.
Oh, I just had an idea! How about a capsule with an ablative heat shield mounted on top of a liquid-fueled, multi-stage heavy lifter?! I know, I know, I'm a genius (and a rocket scientist, IRL, coincidentally).
Re:100%? (Score:5, Interesting)
The survival rate for exploding Soyuz rockets is 100%. It happened once in 1975, and again in 1983. Both times, the crew escaped without major injury. The Russian/Soviet space program has never had a launch failure that resulted in fatalities to crew aboard the ship.
The 1983 incident occurred as the rocket exploded while on the pad, and threw the capsule 6,500 feet into the air, subjecting the cosmonauts to approximately 17g of acceleration. According to popular legend, the cosmonauts destroyed the capsule's voice recorder due to the lengthy string of profanity that it captured during the incident.
Re:Maybe it's just an occupational hazard. (Score:3, Interesting)
My first thought was, "I wish they spent this much time reducing risk for soldiers as they do for astronauts."
Yeah, I'm a soldier. This is kind of sickening in a way since I spent the entire day practicing, "If the first post-attack recon team doesn't report back within 5 minutes, we'll send the backup par team. If the backup par team doesn't report back within 5 minutes, we'll send..."
Our chem warfare training assumes at least a 50% casualty rate. This is not what I signed up for. Astronauts DID sign up for this.
-b
Re:The Air Force is right. (Score:3, Interesting)
hah, how typical, raising a "racist" smokescreen when someone talks how people with no ability are given jobs they aren't qualified for on the baasis of their race in the name of affirmative action. The truth is affirmative action is racist, only ability should matter.
Re:That's OK... (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, then you should know the answer: Cost.
Space travel has to be cost effective. We're not in the 60s anymore where it was a matter of national prestige, where money was no matter and where nobody would have questioned spending another billion to get our men there before those pesky Reds. And of course we must not lose any astronauts when those Russkies don't. After all, we gotta prove our technology is superior to theirs and much safer, and we care about the life of our men while they risk their life carelessly.
Try to argue it today. Space travel is not a matter of prestige anymore. Anyone can do it. Even "backwater" countries like India have rockets today, being a spacefaring nation is no longer something to show off how superior you are. People accept the need to put satelites into the orbit so they can watch sat TV and have international calls, but putting people up there? What for, leave it to countries that have spare money to blow up.
Yes, it's quite near sighted and many people don't even come close to understanding what technological progess we owe to the space program. A lot of research done for space programs created as a by-product some discoveries nobody would have invested a cent in because of the lack of a direct reward. From metallurgy to propulsion to computers, a LOT was tried and most of it was a dead end, but the remaining pieces are gems that we would not have today. Worth it? Hard to say.
But there's no time and money left for ground breaking basic research. If it can't be turned into profit, it's hard to sell it to the taxpayer these days.
Re:IANARS but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Fortunately it seems like this is a problem that *could be corrected* fairly easily -- with, say, a propulsion mechanism on the escape capsule, just enough to give enough delta-V that it would clear the debris cloud in time to deploy the parachutes.
From what I understand, the Orion capsule's launch escape system already has a jettison motor [nasa.gov], but it's not enough to take it out of range of the flaming debris. Increasing the range of the motor isn't an option, because the capsule is already too heavy for the Ares I and they can't add even more weight to it.
Even though rockets like DIRECT's and the Ares V would have the "field of flaming solid rocket propellant debris" problem, my impression is that they have a big enough margin that you'd be able to have a launch escape system that could escape the debris cloud.
Re:100%? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:IANARS but... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's funny *because* its horrible. Your brain doesn't want to empathize so it trips the laughter switch instead.
Thats why comedians love politics so much.
Re:More Broadly... (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect that most of the risk is being hit by vehicles trying to pass the garbage truck while it is stopped to collect refuse(googling around didn't bring up a definitive justification for this, just references to a "University of Miami study" that said so). Adding, and enforcing, those little no passing signs, as they do for school buses, would presumably cut this down, at the expense of significant travel delays.
Re:100%? (Score:1, Interesting)
The Russian/Soviet space program has never had a launch failure that resulted in fatalities to crew aboard the ship.
True. Of course, there was the small matter of the 120 or so people incinerated in the Nedelin disaster, but they were on the ground.
Re:IANARS but... (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought the reason why they shot these things off from an island in a sparsely populated area, over the ocean, far away from major shipping channels, was in case it glitches an explodes near the ground after flight, nobody (besides the astronauts) would be near it. It's not like Orlando is a particularly large city (famous because of Disney world, yes, large... no). Detonating a giant fucking space bomb over the ocean to "save lives" seems a bit silly. It's not like they're launching it in downtown Pittsburgh with a flight path over Manhattan.
Re:IANARS but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nitpick: The Challenger SRBs were fine. The external tank failed.
The SRBs leaked a bit of fire through the O-ring, and that fire meant that one of the SRBs cut itself away from the external tank - the attachment at the bottom of the tank failed, the one at the top didn't, and that was enough to plow the nose of the SRB into the tip of the external tank.
*boom*
The external tank tore itself apart from the aerodynamic stresses, leading to the big white plume of water vapor. The shuttle was torn apart shortly thereafter from similar aerodynamic stresses.
Both SRBs - even the one with fire belching out of the lower O-ring - can be seen in video of the disaster as flying onwards, well away from the conflagration, relatively unscathed. They were eventually blown up by range control officers.
The root cause of the failure cascade was indeed a problem with the SRB, things did go to hell all of a sudden in a rather spectacular way, and it certainly sucked to be them.
But technically, the SRBs themselves didn't fail catastrophically. Anyone lucky (?) enough to have been riding along in the nose cone of the SRB along with the SRB parachutes (let's assume the presence of suitable breathing apparatus since it's probably not pressurized, the presence of sound/vibrationproofing, temperature control, and of course, a nice parachute for our intrepid stowaway) would have had pretty good odds compared to the Challenger crew... well, at least until range control blew up the SRBs.
hmm (Score:2, Interesting)
could Nasa not come up with an alternative way of slowing the capsule down, such as gliding in some way? Maybe even use shape charges
to blow debree/bits-o-exploding-rocket away from the capsule? -- A bit like fighting (uncontrolled) fire with (controlled) fire..
Again, I don't claim to know anything about anything.. Just typing random thoughts..
Re:That's OK... (Score:3, Interesting)
Back in the ~70s, in the bidding stage of the shuttle program, General Dynamics had some interesting designs for a reusable--- FLYABLE---landed on its own, was piloted--- liquid fueled boost stage for a shuttle... and that proposed version of the shuttle was made of titanium mostly and had about 2X the payload, and far more range, and probably would have cost 1/4 of the final "cheaper" congressional mandated aluminum design.
Perhaps we should dust off some of the designs that lost the shuttle design-off due to congressional interference.
The shuttles concept didn't suck.
The final design did.
(My dad worked for GD back in the day, including at the cape)
Re:100%? (Score:4, Interesting)
The rocket that exploded to cause the Nedelin disaster was an ICBM -- strictly speaking, not even part of the space program.
Additionally, the Russian space program had notable problems with re-entry, safety on the ground, automated docking, off-target landings, or the fact that they couldn't get the N-1 to work at all.
However, we're not talking about any of these things. Russia's launch abort system has proven itself to be successful, and has saved lives in two separate incidents. Although NASA has certainly done a better job of other aspects of its program, its launch abort system has never been used in practice and is conspicuously absent from the shuttle, which is the entire point of this conversation.
Odds are that both uses of the Russian launch abort system could have been avoided by correcting deficiencies present elsewhere in their space program. However, it's certainly nice to have redundancies present in the system. Shuttle missions have to be conducted with outright paranoia due to some of its design deficiencies.
Re:IANARS but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:100%? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I wouldn't want to be on the ground either (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:IANARS but... (Score:3, Interesting)
In most failure modes of a 747, an escape module would be useless, i.e. either it's safer to stay in the plane and try to land it anyway, or things go to hell so suddenly that there's no chance to activate such a module.
Also, a 747 doesn't carry fuel and oxidizer. It can catch fire, but not nearly as spectacularly as a rocket.
Commentary at NASA Watch (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, most of these comments are made pseudonymously and should be therefore be taken with a grain of salt, but they're still quite interesting:
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/07/ares_doubts_con.html [nasawatch.com]
Sources report that Steve Cook and his team were preoccupied on Friday with the ramifications of this report going public. Several meetings were held on Friday and another was planned for Saturday morning. Lots of finger pointing and asking questions along the lines of "who knew what and when did they know it?" and "how do we respond?" was reported to have happened on Friday. A briefing is being prepared for NASA Administrator Bolden for presentation as early as Monday.
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/07/usaf_orion_crew.html [nasawatch.com]
When people at MSFC tried to discuss this in 2007/2008 "Niki the aborts manager" shut them down and made sure two most vocal left the group.
Re:IANARS but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually it does matter how the Challenger failed. It matters because the issue being discussed is whether or not sitting a crew on top of a SSB passes the safety standard that NASA is using. The GGP claimed the Challenger disaster was due to a SSB failure, and the GP corrected him.
If you read the GP again you'll see that he is pointing out that while SSBs have terrible failure modes, the probability of reaching those modes is lower. In any risk analysis it is important to quantify the probability of a complete failure, as well as the impact.
Give than an SSB is essentially a giant firework, which once lit the only thing to do is either a) retreat to a safe distance (ground staff) or b) pray (crew), it is saying something that the overall safety could be higher than the shuttle. But the shuttle takes the same dangerous SSBs and adds millions of complex parts with non-zero probabilities of failure.
While you have a point about redesigning the rocket until the escape system does work, and for a commercial transport system this would be essential, you seem to be missing something vital. Launch vehicles like this are at the limit of our current technology and engineering skills. We may have to settle for making them work at all, rather than extra niceties such as safety. Given the huge amounts of energy required to reach space, and that currently the only options that we have are detonating vast quantities of explosives slowly... there is a limit to how safe we can make this.
Re:Solid vs liquid rockets (Score:3, Interesting)
You can't throttle them and you can't turn them off
I've already responded to that in another message. Yet you continue to repeat a statement you know to be, at best, questionable. This makes me wonder what other facts you might be ignoring.
Also they have significantly better performance.
From what I'm told, liquid-fuel rockets have better propellant efficiency, but solid-fuel rockets have better thrust-to-mass ratios, as I explained. But by all means, continue ignoring what I'm saying; that really helps your case.
You do get some warnings ergo the Saturn could and did turn engines off in flight and continued with the mission.
No argument there. That's also happened pre-launch for the shuttle SSMEs, and one of the Gemini missions.
However, liquid rockets also blow up more often than solid rockets, or so I'm told. Hell, even STS-51-L's SRBs kept flying after the ET had blown to bits; they were detonated by the RSO. If it wasn't for the big ass fuel tank right next to them, the O-ring burn-through wouldn't have been a problem. ("Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?")
I'm not convinced that the benefits of solid rockets outweigh the drawbacks, but I'm willing to have an information discussion about it. Are you?
Also those boosters are *not* cheap.
The shuttle SRBs ain't free, but the SSMEs make 'em look downright cheap in comparison.
... the need for solids nill ...
I was talking to an actual rocket scientist who worked for Boeing corp. What are your qualifications, if I may ask? Are you just another armchair engineer, as I am myself?