The Shuttle program had security to the point of including armed patrols of the entire launch pad and swampland area, in case a terrorist was looking to hide and fire an RPG or Stinger at a launch vehicle…
Clarke’s short story Refugee comes to mind.
[QUOTE=Hail Ants]
The Shuttle program had security to the point of including armed patrols of the entire launch pad and swampland area
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As someone who used to provide such services, I can say there is a non-zero chance of getting into the extended fenced pad area. On the gantry itself: not so much.
I know that weight had to be carefully accounted for. I don’t know whether or not the weight of an additional person would be enough to screw up calculations enough to affect the end result of a liftoff. I’m guessing not - anyone know?
ou’d have no chance sneaking. The right way to do it is by shuttle-jacking – just take over the cabin with a pistol and a grenade. Then you can force them to fly you intor orbit, until it’s time to land and be arrested, or killed during the crash.
Well, you know what they have to do when they catch a stowaway.
OT, but what was the short story about a conman who would help people escape Earth, but it turns out they were placed in a cargo area in which the conman didn’t think they would survive. Turns out they did, and were subjected to excruciating pain. The conman ends up being sent to the very planet his victims were sent to.
That story was one of the biggest cheats in SF history and I love posting links which point out its dumber plot holes.
More analysis because I know nobody asked, and I don’t care.
Derleth, have you done or read similar analysis on The Martian? In that one, the fiction does contain certain impossible elements, as acknowledged by the author as explicitly chosen for the sake of the plot, but is mostly composed of real or plausible things. (the main impossible element is right at the beginning - wind force is proportional to pressure, so the storm that starts the crisis isn’t plausible.)
Max needs thermal curtain failure.
Max and Jinx: friends…forever.
Oh my gosh, I think this is the first reference I’ve ever seen to that move in the wild, as it were. My sister (who is now in her 30s) can still recite most of the script from memory.
But there were no stowaways in that film! They were on-board legitimately, it just wasn’t expected that they’d actually launch.
(For those who did not spend their entire childhoods subject to endless VHS replays of a ridiculous kid’s movie plagued by the world’s most unfortunate release date: Space Camp)
‘Jump over’.
You mean, using your arms and legs? 70 miles up, while the whole apparatus is travelling at thousands of MPH?
What’s so bad about 6/6/1986?
Very close to the Challenger disaster for a Space Shuttle Accident movie
Nothing’s wrong with 6/6/1986. What’s unfortunate is its proximity to 1/28/1986.
Yeah, I remember when the trailer for that movie came out, I think I first saw it in a theater. Has the plot point and earnestly spoken line, “We’ve got overheat on booster B!”. When the trailer ended the whole audience reacted with stunned silence. The fact that it was a goofy, Disney-esque kid’s movie only made it seem worse. A film like that could have/should have been shelved for at least a year.
On the real spacecraft, the flame was invisible and didn’t trip a sensor directly, did it? (the hot gas escaping the faulty joint between the booster segments)
I’ve heard the argument made quite a few times that something like those boosters should have been manufactured in a single piece for many reasons. Not just less risk of the seal breaking, but better and more consistent thrust. It should have been made in a facility a short distance away from the launch site, and moved by a train or barge to the integration facility, but this would have meant less pork for other Congressional districts.
As I recall, the flame burned through the SRB on the inside (towards the LOX tank), and the reduction in thrust was noted by the on-board computers, and was compensated for. The next indication of a problem was the ship exploding as the LOX tank was pierced by the flame.
The SRM case was made in segments because of the difficulty in handling and transporting a unitary case of that size, and because it would have been impossible with the facilities then available to perform a single pour of the propellant grain of that size (500 metric tons of propellants per booster). There could be no serious consideration to placing a motor production facility anywhere in Florida and especially not on the coast, as the typical 60% to 80% relative humidity levels would interfere with both liner integrity and propellant cure cycles, and the ammonium perchlorate (AP) used as the oxidizer would pull humidity right out of the air, saturating the motor grain with interstitial water with all of the attendant detriments, hence why AP is typically stored in desert conditions and Morton Thiokol (now Orbital ATK) produces all large solid motors at the Magna and Promontory facilities in Utah. Aerojet-General (now Aerojet-Rocketdyne) had a program to develop a high performance replacement for the RSRM called the Advanced Solid Rocket Motor (ASRM), a unitary fiber wound composite case with a more energetic propellant which would have been produced in Tennessee and shipped by a dedicated rail transporter to Cape Canaveral AFS, but after expending upwards of US$2B difficulties with manufacture and feasibility studies indicated that the cost and rejection rate would be significantly greater than using segmented boosters and so the ASRM was scrapped.
The Air Force had extensive prior experience with both large diameter and segmented motors (albeit none that were both as large and segmented as the SRBs) that NASA leveraged on, originally as an Apollo Plus proposal and later as the STS Booster segment. Solid motors were selected to reduce complexity and schedule risk as well as cost, and are one of the few STS subsystems that came in within schedule and at cost. The segmentation of the motors proved to be beneficial in terms of refurbishment. The motors themselves were poured in motor sets in which the individual propellant batches were mixed and split to obtain a thrust variance that was typically significantly less than 0.1%, which is actually less thrust variance than between the Shuttle Main Engines, although given the much higher thrust levels and outboard location of the SRBs such tight control was necessary. The essential design flaw in the motors wasn’t the existence of a field joint per se, but rather the design of the joint that both allowed the joint to flex under combined pressurization and external wind shear loads combined with two in-line o-ring seals which instead of offering redundancy actually increased the potential for jetting of blowby of the first o-ring into eroding the second. This joint flexure design issue had already been recognized and fixed on the filament wound case motors designed for the cancelled Blue Shuttle program, and the joint design in that motor was essentially used for the Redesigned Shuttle Rocket Motors (RSRM) along with a third out-of-line o-ring, joint heaters, an additional insulation flap overlapping and sealing the joint from the inside, and a change in the potting compound in the o-ring groove.
This issue was well known by both NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) and Morton-Thiokol due to observed erosion in the o-rings of recovered segments but was dismissed as a problem by the management of both organizations because the erosion was only partial. Working level engineers at both MSFC and Morton-Thiokol warned of the danger of ignoring this out-of-design condition and explicitly objected to the launch in January 1986 at ambient temperatures well below the motor qualification range. However, one of the worst incidences of erosion observed prior to the Challenger disaster actually occurred in a launch at an ambient temperature of 75 °F, and a detail analysis of the conditions of Challenger actually attributed the lack of compression and eventual breeching of the field joint to the pooling of cold oxygen from the LOX vent in the area of the field joint combined with the unusually high wind shear rather than the ambient temperature, both of which are conditions that would not have been represented in the original qualification test firings. BTW, Thiokol was negotiating a contract for the delivery of new motor sets to support 55 flights which may have influenced the management unwillingness to press MSFC on the decision to fly in the Jan 28 conditions; however, in retrospect, this failure could have occurred on any flight.
BTW, despite the common description, Challenger did not “explode”. The jet from the field joint on the right SRB cut into the External Tank (ET) structure causing it to fail locally, venting the LH[SUB]2[/SUB] tank and causing one or more of the struts holding the SRB to the ET to pull away. This allowed the right SRB to rotate off-axis, colliding with and breeching the ET as well as creating an offset thrust that set the entire ascent assembly, including the Orbiter Vehicle (OV) spinning. The aerodynamic loading at this speed ensured that the OV and other components would be torn apart notwithstanding the escape and reaction of of propellants, and the resultant combustion of the vented LOX and LH[SUB]2[/SUB], which the casual observer may take as an “explosion” was only incidental to the breakup of the OV. The actual explosion of the SRBs which separated and tumbled in for end until approximately 35 seconds later was due to the Range Safety Officer initiating the flight destruct charges which split the SRB case lengthwise. The crew cabin of the OV broke away from the main fuselage and entered a flat spin until it struck the ocean surface. The crew was likely rendered unconscious if not dead by the loss of pressurization and acceleration forces exceeding 20 g, but certainly would have died on impact which would have been essentially equivalent to driving a car over a cliff into the Grand Canyon.
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