Maybe I’m being too harsh - I admit I just skimmed the article - but at a quick blush, it struck me funny.
"If NASA’s colossal new moon rocket, slated to launch with astronauts for the first time as soon as tomorrow, explodes on the pad or breaks up as it accelerates through the atmosphere, the space agency has a plan:
Fire a powerful motor affixed to the top of the crew capsule that is literally designed to outrun debris from an exploding rocket, flip the capsule around as it soars through the air, then deploy parachutes to bring the astronauts back to safety."
Hmm, I did not know that. Then why is it news now? I’m all for astronaut safety, don’t get me wrong, but it still seems a funny solution in my mind. But, hey, what ever works.
If it does, of course. It seems like a fairly narrow range of disasters, out of all of the many possible, that it would help with, and it’s never actually been used successfully.
It might have worked on the Challenger, except that the Shuttle didn’t have any such system, because the manned module was far too big for it to be possible. But then again, that disaster was also one that couldn’t have happened, at least in that form, on a more conventional rocket design.
It may have been news in 196x when Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo were first launching, but you would have been too young to notice and “news” was a much smaller thing before then Internet.
Launch escape systems in other launch vehicles have been recently newsworthy:
My father’s parents had some sort of connection° to somebody involved with designing the escape system for the Saturn V. He reportedly was especially proud that it never had to be used.
°: I don’t remember how or its degree. Among plenty of other Air Force bases in the 50s & 60s, they spent many years at Edwards. Grampa was AF intelligence, Gramma was a secretary for NASA (she knew a bunch of test pilots, like some guy named Neil).
You’re right, I forgot that. Reading about it, mission designers opted for an ejection seat system, which they thought would be good enough because the Titan II Gemini Launch Vehicle fuel choice would produce a smaller explosion, so less need for a high-G escape engine. (Although, as designed, ejecting would have incinerated the astronauts because of the pure-oxygen environment turning them and everything they wore into fuel to be lit off by the ejection seat motor.)
In the Apollo 13 movie, soon after the launch scene, you see one of the astronauts push a button labeled “LES MOTOR FIRE”, and then you see the Launch Escape System detach from the rocket and accelerate away.
I think because if you weren’t around for the Apollo or earlier missions, then a lot of what is involved in a moon mission would be unfamiliar to you. The media is just informing you of what we all knew back then.
I found it interesting that the other day, CNN published a “vocabulary” of mission terms that will be used. I had a look, and they were all familiar: things like “TLI [Trans Lunar Injection],” “T-minus,” and so on. For us kids back in the 1960s and early 1970s, who all avidly followed space missions, this stuff was common knowledge, through we may have to dredge it up from deep in our memories nowadays.
We haven’t been designing new manned spacecraft for some time. The shuttle and then hitching rides with Soyuz were most of the last 40 years.
As mentioned, there has been the development of two different crew-rated systems in the last 15 years, so there has been some press about their engineering milestones, including testing their LESs. Why those got overlooked will vary from person to person.
And it isn’t just Americans. The Soyuz has a LES, but they never had to use it. The one time they would have used it, it had been ejected and they had to use different engines to escape the soon-to-be exploding spacecraft.
A Rube Goldberg solution would be something like, the commander pulls a string, dropping a piece of cheese. A rat, sensing the cheese, runs over, pulling a string. The string rings a small bell, where a trained parrot that has been conditioned to lay an egg at the sound of a bell, depostis one on a balanced cup. The weight of the egg causes the cup to drop, hitting a lever that releases a ball that rolls down a spiral ramp until it hits a scissors, which cuts a cord, releasing a weight that pulls the trigger of a gun, shooting a charge of explosive and separating the capsule from the booster. Easy peasy!
Reality was far more mundane, but equally as interesting!
For those of us in the “future rocket scientist” group. Estes had a flying model version, which is still in production as of a few years ago.
As I recall, in the Challenger case, the crew module stayed intact until it impacted at high speed with the water. So could some type of a parachute system, without any engine, have worked to slow the descent to a survivable level?
I just learned that a friend of mine (a NASA contractor) had a hand in the LES, as well as in the orbital maneuvering thrusters.
I mean, potentially? But it’d have to have been an awfully big parachute, big enough that it’d cut significantly into cargo capacity. And cutting into cargo capacity would mean more launches, each with its own risks. It’s far from a given that it would have been safer overall.
Just like generals always fighting the last war, it’s easy to figure out, after a disaster, how it could have been averted. What’s hard is averting all of the disasters, before any of them actually happens.
Also, Challenger was traveling at about Mach 2 when it broke up. It would be quite an engineering challenge to design a parachute that could deploy at that speed without getting ripped to shreds and also be big enough to slow the shuttle to a survivable landing speed.
