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.
