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...
The same NASA (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:100% (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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: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: (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.
Solid vs liquid rockets (Score:4, Informative)
"100% liquid fuel was always the right way to do. Loose the solids..."
When someone says "solid rocket" most people think of Challenger. The problem there was that the rocket was operated in conditions outside of design specifications. Liquid fuel rockets tend to fail when pushed beyond their limits, too. I've certainly seen plenty of footage of both types exploding.
I asked about this question to an actual rocket scientist not long ago. My take was that liquid fuel seems safer because you can control it off after ignition. His response, in part: "Offhand I know of at least several cases of a liquid fuel engine going 'BOOM!' and everyone being surprised." Apparently many of the failure modes don't allow for any warning; it just explodes before you can do anything. Further, reportedly, simply "turning off" a rocket engine in flight is not as simple as it sounds; the dynamic loads are complex, and doing it wrong can cause the vehicle to break-up. He said that solid rockets are typically more reliable than liquids, because of their simple design. Liquid fuel motors are very complex, and thus cost more to make, and to make reliable.
He also described an aspect of flight dynamics: Rockets launched vertically go through two phases. The first is overcoming the force of gravity to get it airborne; the second accelerates it downrange and into orbit. Solids lend themselves towards the first phase, because they have a high trust-to-mass ratio. In the second phase, propellant efficiency matters more, and then liquid engines are a win.
He did say that the choice of a solid rocket for the first stage of Area was driven entirely by time and cost constraints. There's no way NASA could have designed and tested a liquid-fuel rocket motor of sufficient thrust and reliability within the time and money allotted.
Now, this is just one guy's take, so I'm not accepting it as ultimate truth. But he knows more than I do.
I, too, have a rather romantic vision of the Saturn V, but given that it was only launched about a dozen times, I'm not sure how realistic that vision is.
Re: (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
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: (Score:2)
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.
Why is this so funny, if it actually happens it would be a tragedy.
Yet I can't get off the floor from the initial ROFL factor.
Re: (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.
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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 decis
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It doesn't matter how the Challenger actually failed. The shuttle has no survivable launch abort scenarios.
Challenger carried an Inertial Upper Stage booster in an active cradle. NASA provided several launch abort scenarios to contractors and required the contractors to analyze the active cradle's behavior in the abort scenarios to demonstrate that the active cradle would not make a bad situation worse. The Rogers Commission found all of the NASA abort scenarios, such as early separation of the boosters,
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.
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[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
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.
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True enough. Also the linked articles are unclear what, if any, propulsion mechanisms the escape pod has. It seems to me like they may be relying on the explosion of the engine failure to propel them out of the explosion.
If this is the case then I can very much see how the Air Force's report makes sense. Small chunks of burning propellent are sure to fly faster/farther then some hunk of metal.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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. It's even easier since you're flying through the air: perhaps you could deploy some sort of air brake or aerodynamic device to change the drag characteristics of the capsule enough to escape the cloud?
It doesn't have to survive the heat or provide a safe landing
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: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:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The Bruce Willis Rocket Design Company, eh?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Actually, I was thinking that now I finally understand why they decided to reuse the name Orion for this rocket concept.
Re: (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.
Re: (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 saf
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The diagrams in the released PDF seem to indicate this is in the context of an air-burst type failure.
A failure of the rocket which involves the rocket simply crashing back into the ground doesn't seem to be covered here (though it's somewhat doubtable if such a failure could realistically take place).
Re:IANARS but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (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 Pittsb
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Air Force is right. (Score:4, Informative)
The armed services ... promote solely on the basis of merit.
As a former member of the armed services, I find that hilarious.
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.
You are unambiguously WRONG (Score:3, Informative)
This AC is unambiguously WRONG about DoD policy regarding affirmative action and equal opportunity.
I normally ignore these racist rants from ACs but since it has been modded up as informative by unsuspecting mods, I will respond in brief.
ALL branches of the military have policy and guidelines in place for recruiting, retainment and training of disadvantaged minorities. This is unequivocal FACT.
These policies and guidelines are open and fully available to the general public:
Army: http://www.aschq.army.mil/s [army.mil]
Re: (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.
Re: (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:The Air Force is right. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:IANARS but... (Score:5, Insightful)
sign of the times... (Score:3, Funny)
The Old NASA wouldn't settle for anything less than =100%!
100%? (Score:2)
Re:100%? (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, the survival rate of exploding space shuttles is currently 0% as well... At least the Ares as a mechanism to even allow for an early abort.
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:100%? (Score:4, Funny)
Only Russians could swear while undergoing 17 g acceleration.
Re:100%? (Score:4, Informative)
Without that last qualification things get a little hairier [wikipedia.org].
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:100%? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
When I visited the Kennedy Space Center a couple of years ago, they explained that NASA was extremely proud to never have lost an astronaut in space. Apparently, astronauts lost while on their way to space, or coming back from space, or just rehearsing going to space, don't really count...
Re:100%? (Score:4, Informative)
It wasn't the explosion that killed the Challenger astronauts but impact with the sea. [wikipedia.org]
Re:100%? (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair, the survival rate of exploding space shuttles is currently 0% as well... At least the Ares as a mechanism to even allow for an early abort.
Allow me to present a little bit more context. Back in 2004, NASA received several competing designs for lunar launch architectures, most/all of which involved using liquid-fueled EELV rockets. In 2005 the (now former) administrator Michael Griffin came in, tossed out all the EELV-based designs, and focused the agency on implementing his own solid-rocket design which eventually became the Ares I. A big part of the justification is that the EELV-based designs would have "black zones" during which a rocket failure would be non-survivable, while the Ares I supposedly had no such black zones and was therefore the only legitimate solution. Ironically, since that time the EELVs have been shown to have no such 'black zones," while this latest report indicates that the Ares I has a huge black zone which covers the entire first minute of flight. That means that what was thought to be the main justification for the Ares I is actually a huge deficiency.
Curiously, the other main justifications for the Ares I were that it would be finished faster and cost less than EELV-based designs. As it turned out, it's taking far longer than the EELVs were expected to take, and the cost has ballooned by almost an order of magnitude. With any luck Barack Obama will take the upcoming report from the Augustine Commission and end the Ares I program before it does any more damage.
Re:100%? (Score:5, Funny)
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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 thin
Re:100%? (Score:4, Informative)
Oh please, you can't compare the missed milestones of one program against another program that never missed a milestone because it never started.
Actually, since the other designs used already-existing EELV rockets, there were essentially quite a few milestones already finished.
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.
Yeah... it's also kind of interesting how the supposedly safer "man-rated" systems seem to have a pretty similar failure rate to the non-man-rated launch vehicles. IMHO, the only way you can really get a good idea of the safety of a system is through repeated unmanned testing, which coincidentally the EELVs have quite a few flights worth of already.
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.
Coincidentally, this was pretty much what the original plan was back in 2004: The top two design proposal teams (one headed by Lockheed Martin, the other headed by Northrop Grumman and Boeing) would receive initial funding of $1 billion and compete against each other in an unmanned "fly-off" test of their EELV-based in 2008. Former administrator Michael Griffin was convinced his design was safer/better/faster though, so he tossed out the existing designs (and the whole idea of competitive parallel development) and focused NASA on his Ares I.
Actually (Score:3, Informative)
Slide 2 Lower Right (Score:3, Informative)
Feel free to draw your own conclusion.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I think rather we should look at the cost-benefit ratio of decreasing the risk by a given amount, i.e. if a design decision that costs $X will on average save the lives of Y astronauts over the course of the design, should it be made?
I'm not claiming to know what the correct values of X and Y are. But I believe we should take all reasonable precautions to decrease risk, and this is really the only way to quantify "reasonable". (Granted, "reasonable" might include a lot fewer things than Nasa's doing.)
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.
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:Sometimes /. is so fatalistic (Score:4, Informative)
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...
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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...
Well the ones that blow up less probably won't be the same design as SRBs, so they won't be made in the same congressional district as the SRBs so they won't get certain congress critters' approval.
That's my understanding of why they went solid instead of liquid and accepted the resulting vibration problems not realizing that the shuttle has a giant liquid damper on it...
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Re:Sometimes /. is so fatalistic (Score:4, Funny)
Of course, a solid steel parachute! Why didn't we think of this before!
Signed,
Ares Engineers
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?
Re:Ares Rocket less safe than a Space Shuttle? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Ares Rocket less safe than a Space Shuttle? (Score:4, Informative)
Soyuz. The rocket exploded twice, in 1975 and 1983, and each time the crew survived. See http://www.janes.com/aerospace/civil/news/jsd/jsd030203_3_n.shtml [janes.com]
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Annnnd that the idea of a capsule that could only be opened from the outside was ideal, along with a 100% oxygen atmosphere, and that properly insulated wiring was a "luxury option". They learned that REALLY fast. But that actually had nada to do with actual launch safety.
Now if you were to compare the launch proven Saturn V rocket to the Russian M2 rockets, THERE is the big difference:
The Saturn V was designed by Werner Von Braun, who found that several large engines were safer, because you could build in
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.....
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: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:Risk? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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 fo
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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
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.
This isn't the only technical problem with Ares I (Score:4, Informative)
First [spaceref.com], they discovered an oscillation issue from the SRB that could cause damage to the upper stage and the orion capsule. Last year [discovermagazine.com], they found out that with a slight wind gust, the vehicle might collide with its launch tower.
Incidentally, both of these problems and the current one are all related to the SRB. President Obama needs to do the right thing here and kill Ares I before it has the chance to kill anyone.
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:Badass (Score:4, Funny)
They have a burning commitment to the program.
As in, "the Chef is concerned, but the Chicken is committed." :-)
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or the video just cuts off and looks like rain fade.
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.
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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, Informative)
It takes a modern computer far less than six days to computationally model the behavior of the large belt of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter using Newton's law of gravitation.
If you do that, you'll see large gaps ("Kirkwood gaps") develop at radii corresponding to orbital resonances with Jupiter. These gaps take far more than six thousand years to develop.
If you look at the asteroid belt, such gaps actually exist. 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.
Then there's the georadiological evidence that I'm not going to go into because it's less applicable to astronomy.
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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:The Air Force is right. (Score:5, Insightful)
Have you considered asking him how he reconciles the two habits of mind?
Re:The Air Force is right. (Score:5, Funny)
Especially for a German. He designed the thing, wound up retiring from NASA, and teaching English in his German accent.
Guy had quite the sense of humor, along with a reputation for being hard as hell. I asked him in the halls one day how many people had dropped dead from his latest exam, and he said "Oh, all of them! I run a mortuary on the side; good way to get more business!"
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Of course it's socialism's fault! Are you crazy, what else could it be!? And universal healthcare breeds terrorists [thinkprogress.org]!
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).
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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 car
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]
Unl
Re: (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
Re: (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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
GD made a few key mistakes in their attempt to get government contracts. Mostly that they hired engineers instead of lobbyists and spent the money on research instead of kickbacks.
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.
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Launching from Florida also gives them the ability to ditch into the ocean if necessary, instead of into a city.