Occasionally unmanned rockets go off course on launch and are remotely exploded.
What would NASA do if the shuttle spiraled off on a trajectory to hit Orlando?
Nothing, I assume?
They would flip two switches.
What on earth could they do? Remember when endeavor [i think that was the shuttle] shattered across 5 states? There was footage and everything.
I mean this seriously, what could they do? It happens so quickly - less than a minute or two…kind of a moot point. Nasa would behave the same as they did with the endeavor…
Personally if it was headed towards Orlando, I’d just let it crash and burn.
For the factual answer:
“If the looming Discovery mission or any other between now and the spacecraft’s retirement loses control, NASA is prepared to ditch it in the Atlantic—or blow it up.”
ETA: That article was for the launch phase. Don’t know if they would have that capability during re-entry.
If the flight was out of Vandenberg, it’s been covered.
There is an interesting list of STS Abort Modes on Wikipedia, including a list of emergency landing sites.
All of which are of little use now, since manned flights from the USA won’t be happening any time in the near future.
It wasn’t Endeavor. That shuttle is fine and going to a museum. You are thinking of Columbia which scattered debris mostly over East Texas but dropped assorted parts into Northwestern Louisiana and even a few over the Western states as it burned up in rentry. No one got hurt from any of those falling pieces although there were a few close encounters with them and some property damage. You can’t vaporize a shuttle so the debris is coming down somewhere and an isolated debris field is arguably better than scattered one.
One reason the shuttle is launched from Florida is that it is close to ocean where there are few people. You don’t have to wonder about this too much. It did happen with the shuttle Challenger. It just crashed into the ocean and was much more intact at impact than NASA originally led on. Self-destruction explosives are expensive, there is no good way to test them on a shuttle, they add weight where it is least needed, and they introduce risks of their own especially in that environment (you don’t want to add explosives to a vehicle that is always close to doing that anyway). An out of control manned space vehicle means that you can’t control where it goes by definition and the parts needed for those missions are very different than just rockets used to launch satellites. You can basically destroy rockets on demand because they are mostly fuel but that isn’t the case with a large crew vehicle.
Specifically, it’s got an ocean to the east (the direction they launch in when possible).
So…you’re saying that you think the twice cited Popular Mechanics article claiming that the shuttle does have such explosives is a lie?
The article states that the Solid Rocket Boosters have self destruct charges. They were in fact used by the Range Safety Officer during the Challenger disaster.
This is true, and these are called the Flight Termination Ordnance System (FTOS) or sometimes thrust termination ordnance. Their function isn’t to “blow up” the booster (in the sense of making it go away) but rather to sever the nozzle and split the case lengthwise, thereby causing the motor to lose pressure and thrust, and hopefully snuff combustion of the solid propellant, though the surface may continue to burn at a vastly reduced rate during the descent. By terminating thrust, it prevents the booster from flying outside the defined range hazard zone (which is free of inhabited area and main shipping lines), and thus, posing minimal hazard to any people or valuable structures. There would be no reason to “blow up” the Orbiter, as it contains very little propellant itself (just storable liquid propellants for the Orbital Maneuvering System and some gas generators and other small items), and doing so would just create more debris that would pose greater potential hazard.
As previously noted, there are a series of abort modes that range from flying into a lower orbit (as on STS-51-F) to aborting to different ground sites to ditching in the ocean. It is notable, however, that all abort modes occur after SRB separation; there is no credible abort mode during SRB operation, and no way to separate the Orbiter from the SRBs during booster action time, as the sudden change in thrust would destroy the External Tank and Orbiter. In fact, the reason that Challenger broke up was not due to any “explosion” but because the right-side SRB came free from one mount and rotated, causing the Orbiter and ET to experience aerodynamic loads that caused them to break up. (The spontaneous combustion of hydrogen and oxygen that vented from the ET was incidental and did little if any damage to the Orbiter.) The thrust on the ETs has to be matched to a fraction of a percent during the entire action time in order to prevent load imbalance; as a result, SRBs segments were cast in pairs and the propellant weights carefully adjusted to assure balanced thrust. Generally speaking, solid rocket motors have a fairly wide variation of thrust profile and action time in comparison to liquid engines (although imbalances in rockets with multiple liquid engines due to residual propellant in lines is also a significant concern).
The presence of flight termination system (FTS) on the SRBs has been a point of contention between NASA MSFC and the astronaut corps. Although FTS was flown on the first four test flights (STS-1 through -4) there was supposedly a gentlemen’s agreement to remove them after the system had been proven out. However, NASA and the Range Commanders Council which writes RCC-319 about range safety operations requires FTOS on all solid rockets to terminate thrust, and so the devices remain part of the standard SRB configuration. During the Challenger investigation, the destruction of the SRBs was a problem in that intact SRBs would have been easier to recover and inspect. The right hand SRB survived both being detached from the ET and performing several end-over-end acrobatics prior to termination (which was just about ten seconds before end of action time) and would have remained on range, posing no greater hazard, but was terminated per procedure. The Ares I rocket would have also had thrust termination systems on it, although the Constellation Launch Abort System, a tractor rocket mounted on the nose of the Orion capsule, would have ostensibly been able to pull it out of harms way of the booster in the case of an abort. Liquid systems also have flight termination systems, though depending on the propellants they may be designed to just sever the plumbing from the tankage, vent the propellant tanks, or (in the case of caustic storables), assure fully combustion of the propellants.
Stranger
Moreover, the orbiter - when in flight - has astronauts on board. One would not blow up an out-of-control orbiter for the same reason one would not blow up an out-of-control commuter jet.
I’m sure Stranger knows more about it than I, but AFAIK, if the choice is between killing a handful of astronauts who knew the risks going in, and killing a bunch of bystanders in a populated area, who had no choice in the matter, NASA is willing to sacrifice the astronaut lives. (As of course they should be.)
Although it’s sort of moot; as the shuttle needs a runway to land, I assume any of these abort modes would mean the loss of the crew. (And of course it’s even more moot now, as there won’t be any more launches.)
–Cliffy
There have been any number of occasions where civilian aircraft have landed in places other than a runway - the most noteworthy of recent time being Sully’s touchdown in the Hudson River - and had some or all of the passengers and crew survive. Your assumption of “all on board killed” is unwarranted.
Moreover, if deliberate explosive destruction of an occupied-but-out-of-control spacecraft is appropriate, than the same ought to hold true for an occupied-but-out-of-control civilian aircraft.
Except that fragmenting the Orbiter vehicle would produce greater, not less, hazard. At least if the vehicle is intact and marginally controllable, it can be directed to impact in a population free area. A bunch of separated components may disperse and impact across a wide range, posing hazard to a larger range of people. Even if it were projected to crash into a highly populated area–say Manhattan Island–you’d rather it crash and take out three or four blocks blocks than have separate wings, cabin, engine module, and payload take out eight or ten blocks.
If the Orbiter is “out of control” then the crew are very likely either dead or incapable of egressing (the ICES being basically a sop to people who insisted that NASA “do something” about improving safety of the Shuttle). Even the ejection seats that were included originally in Columbia during initial flight tests were only useable in the first few seconds of ascent and the last couple of minutes of descent. After that, the windblast/wind shear would have killed the ejecting crew, which is why the B-58 Hustler and the XB-70 had enclosed eject capsules. The crew of Columbia did not die as commonly asserted by “burning up” on reenry but due to high compressive windblast and being literally torn limb from limb by the shock-shock interactions of the debris field with the air.
Stranger
I’m no expert in orbital mechanics, but wouldn’t any spacecraft anywhere want launch to the east? I’m pretty sure the earth’s rotation adds a non-negligible amount of velocity to their desired total. (Assuming orbit is the end goal)
Unless you don’t want to go onto an equatorial orbit. Orbits that go over the poles are prized for observation satellites. Typically you place the craft in an orbit that crosses over the poles, and takes a carefully chosen period of time that is just slightly more or less than an exact fraction of a day. Then, over time your craft will trace a path that covers the entire surface of the Earth. So, spy sats (the well known Keyholes for example) plus the Earth imaging satellites (Landsat and it descendants, for example) all use polar orbits. To get into a polar orbit you need to kill off all your equatorial velocity, so you launch to the west. You also try to launch from somewhere as far from the equator as possible. Vandenberg, on the West coast is used for just this reason. Sea Launch bases it business partly on an ability to launch equatorial orbit satellites from right on the equator, and polar orbit satellites from very high latitudes, both bringing significant advantages.
This explains why east coast is better than west coast for a launch site (an eastward launch immediately removes the vehicle from populated areas), and why Florida is better than Maine (maximum radius from the Earth’s rotational axis, so largest “head start” on achieving orbital velocity).
Most of the abort modes did involve landing on a designated runway. Transatlantic abort took them to Europe. Abort Once Around back to the US. Return to site back, to KSC. However these abort modes were really only useful for either shuttle that had had a main engine failure that would prevent it from reaching orbit, or had had a failure that meant it could not safely remain in orbit if it got there. The notion of a catastrophic failure leading to an “out of control” shuttle doesn’t really enter into it. On the other hand, any such failures that don’t involve unsurvivable damage to the craft are difficult to imagine.
The more crazy abort idea, added after the Challenger accident involved somehow getting the orbiter into a stable glide, and then bailing out; using an extendible pole to direct the crew safely away from the orbiter, thence parachuting down. I don’t think anyone took this seriously. In principle it was to be used if no runway was available, or for some reason the orbiter could not safely land.
Also note that the Shuttle was also designed to be able to go into polar orbit. At least one polar-orbit Shuttle mission was planned, but was cancelled after the Challenger disaster. Had this mission gone ahead, it would have launched from Vandenberg as well.