Do the Spacex flight suits do anything at all for the astronauts who wear them? I suspect they merely look good on camera.
They protect the astronauts if the cabin depressurizes, but they certainly look science fictionish.
They might look science fictionish because the prototype was designed by a Hollywood costume designer and looking cool was a design requirement.
There was another thread about this a few weeks ago:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=22232523
Spacesuits are extremely important. They keep the astronauts alive in the event of a capsule depressurization.
In 1971, three cosmonauts perished aboard Soyuz 11 when a valve came loose on reentry and caused a loss of pressure. There was not enough room in the capsule for the three cosmonauts and three pressure suits, so they were clad in general issue flight suits. If they had had pressure suits, they undoubtedly would have survived.
It should be noted that this is not the same thing as the requirements for a spacesuit if they wanted to go outside of the capsule (which they have no plan to do).
A space suit that would let you survive in space would be a fair bit more bulky I think.
Right. The get-up we saw for the Dragon crew are pressure suits, not excursion (EVA) suits. Being designed anew rather than derived from a legacy NASA or military pressure suit, they need not resemble those.
Thanks for the link MarkN
Everything about this looks like early SF. I saw a video of the launch preparations, and they transport the rocket horizontally on a trailer, then tip it upright for launch. It’s like a 1950s movie. Then, seeing this simple big stick of a rocket blasting off the pad is like something out of the early days of the space program.
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After docking with the ISS, the astronauts reported they were drying off their suits. What was that about? I’ve not heard of that before.
I think I heard it mentioned that it was just airing out the suits, to remove all the accumulated moisture from sweat and breathing. Since the suits have impermeable layers you can’t just wait for natural evaporation, particularly if they’re folded up and stowed, so there’s a procedure to blow in fresh air until they’re dry. IIRC it basically involves hooking up the suits to the air supply that the astronauts use, since that system already is capable of supplying a lot of air and dealing with the exhaled moisture.
Thanks.
They do that for a lot of boosters. Most, if not all, of the ICBMs and SLBMs are transported horizontally; it’s just logistically far easier.
IIRC, the Saturn V was transported horizontally in its sections, mated, erected upright, and then filled with propellant/oxidizers. Can’t do that with solid-fuel missiles. They already come loaded with the fuel, and transporting vertical would be a major safety issue.
Tripler
Tipping missiles is not as fun, nor safe, as tipping cows.
So is to this day the Soyuz booster – moved in a horizontal position on a rail track to the pad, then raised and fueled, like its R7 ancestor from 60 years ago.
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Meanwhile the other manned spacecraft booster, China’s Shenjiang 2F, is stacked in the assembly building and rolled to the pad in the vertical, a-la Apollo/Saturn.
OK, so the suits they were wearing were not space-suits, but in fact were pressure suits. Pressure suits are designed to keep the astronaut alive if there is a “pin-hole” leak in the cabin during lift off or landing. And, they have a 20-30 minute air supply.
I think the wave of the future for space-flight is the British Skylon project. I am happy, however, that America is going back into space.
The shuttle was rolled to the pad fully erect.
Does this have to do with whether they are liquid or solid fuel rockets?
IIRC the Soyuz is liquid (so can be on its side while it is light with no fuel then raised up) while the Long March rockets had solid fuel in them…too heavy to tip over and lift back up so wheeled out upright).
Just a guess. I really do not know.
The 2F is all-liquid fueled, including the dropoff boosters, though earlier models did have solids.
Obviously something the size of a fully stacked up Saturn V would be cumbersome to go tipping up and down, even empty, so there’s that, for sure
One might suppose that if they built infrastructure to deal with solid fuel rockets that weren’t tipped over that they’d just kinda keep going with that even once they went to all liquid.
Everything was in place for upright deployment so may as well just go with that.
Rockets using solid propellant rocket motors can be transported either as individual motors or integrated boosters horizontally and then erected/integrated/implaced vertically for launch. The LGM-30A/B/F/G Minuteman and LGM-118A Peacekeeper ICBMs were transported and erected using the Minuteman Transporter Erector and Peacekeeper Emplacer which lowered them into silos. Other solid propellant vehicles are erected using an open strongback, or individual stages are rotated using an articulating stand and then lifted into place and integrated on the launch stand. Since the original Atlas most liquid propellant launch vehicles have the stages being integrated vertically on launch stand but SpaceX (like the Soviet liquid launch vehicles) elected to use horizontal integration and a strongback erector, which has the advantage of faster and easier integration at the cost of having to develop and maintain the strongback. The Saturn I/IB/V/INT-20 and Space Transportation System (“Shuttle”) are fairly unique in being vertically integrated in the purpose-designed Vehicle Assembly Building and then rolled out to the pad erect, which was itself a major challenge.
The HOTOL/Skylon is a pipe-dream that despite over four decades of development has yet to produce a single proof-of-concept test article and would require near magical thermal protection technology to work even if the problems with a combined-cycle hydrogen burning engine. Spaceplane concepts in general suffer from the problem of the penalty of carrying all of the aerolift mass to orbit for no reason other than to facilitate control upon reentry while also having to meet the performance requirements of an single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) vehicle. It’s like making a performance car that is also a submarine, which is a neat gimmick in a Bond movie that would never work in reality. (The American Shuttle and Russian Buran dealt with this by making significant mass portions of the propulsion system expendable at the cost of greater complexity.)
As for the question of the o.p., the more I look at those suits the less prone I am to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are in any way viable in terms of protecting the crew in an actual emergency. On the other hand, relatively few emergencies in flight are survivable anyway; one of the criticisms of NASA post-Columbia is that while the crew were wearing their ACES suits, they weren’t secured for pressure, as if having their helmets closed and a layer of Nomex was going to save the crew as the orbiter broke up at hypersonic speeds. The pressure suits basically protect against a non-explosive loss of pressure and (maybe) a ground abort where there is leaking hypergolic propellant, and in pretty much every other case will do exactly fuck-all to protect against explosion, fire, impact, and catastrophic loss of containment. So SpaceX elected to go the electrodance-robot-DJ route because the Rule of Cool transcends the unlikely conditions in which a flight suit would protect the astronauts. They certainly look better in the cabin mood lighting than pumpkin suits, anyway.
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