There will be one:
You might depart the theater after Gravity with mixed emotions about going to space yourself. Cuaron’s tracking shots and sweeping vistas of the blue marble below evoke a sort of spiritual response, especially in the spaces between suspense when the movie gets quiet. Of course, the Bullock and Clooney spend much of the film spinning and flailing in mortal danger, dodging hunks of metal that become ballistic missiles at orbital speed. Jones sees Gravity as appearing amid a rising wave of interest in space brought on by the emerging private space industry, and that’s a hopeful trend. But humanity has to be realistic about risk assessment, and ready for the high drama of trying to rescue space travelers after a disaster in orbit. Perhaps when space travel becomes common, and not simply the domain of professional astronauts, we’ll treat space disasters like plane crashes—tragedies that can be made extremely uncommon, but never eliminated. And that will be a good thing.
Yes. That’s the fundamental premise of my book.
Yes, the odds are there will be one someday on the ISS. The big questions will be if they abandon the ISS as a result, as they did with the Challenger accident, as being too dangerous or if they will keep it in orbit.
There’s an old skydiving saying, “You keep pulling handles until your goggles fill with blood.” When you’re in a real life-or-death emergency, there’s not any time for screaming, you just carry on- with a parachute malfunction, you have the rest of your life to figure it out. Both times I had to use a reserve chute, I was cool as a cucumber but shaking minutes later after the emergency had passed.
I’ve flown on a rocket and will do so again, but I’m not going to pretend that it’s safe. As little hazard as I can make it, sure- but LIFE ain’t safe. In the five years that I was actively skydiving, three friends died (but actually in plane crashes, not the skydiving itself). You could get nailed by a semi on the highway on your drive home tonight.
Yes, so true. But Congress seems to think Space is different given how they roasted NASA in hearings over Apollo I, Challenger and Columbia effectively closing the HSF part of the agency for 1-2 years. That is the key problem. If the Congress/President let would only let NASA handle it the way the military does when an accident occurs, investigate and fix, NASA wouldn’t be so risk adverse.
BTW the way Rand, you forget today is the 9th Anniversary of SpaceShipone, and the 56th Anniversary of Sputnik…
If the Congress/President let would only let NASA handle it the way the military does when an accident occurs, investigate and fix, NASA wouldn’t be so risk adverse.
While I agree in principle, how do you think Congress would handle the military flying multi-billion dollar aircraft that crashed and burned one flight in sixty? Particularly if there was no affordable way to build replacements, because the production lines were closed down long ago?
I’m guessing they wouldn’t be saying ‘fix it and carry on’.
We don’t have to guess. A 2.1 billion dollar B2 bomber crashed shortly after takeoff in 2008. I have no way of knowing how many total sorties the B2 fleet has had, but each of those vehicles is on par with the cost of a space shuttle. The crew survived that crash, and it didn’t have the PR spectacle that either shuttle disaster had, but we can at least compare them on a cost-to-taxpayers basis. As for Congress, well they didn’t shut down the entire Stealth bomber program. I am 100% certain that the USAF investigated the crash thoroughly and analyzed it nine ways from Sunday and learned every lesson they possibly could, and then corrected any inherent errors in software or vehicle design or aircrew training or procedures, because the military continues to use the B2 to this day.
By 2008, the B-2 had been flying safely for ten years, and the fleet must have completed many thousands of flights. Challenger was lost on its tenth flight, while a B-2 probably flew more than ten times before it was delivered to the Air Force. The B-2 that crashed had flown for more than 5,000 hours, vs less than 10 hours of actual ‘flying’ time for Challenger.
The shuttle was about half as dangerous as a WWII bomber facing the might of the Nazi military. There’s no way Congress would just shrug and accept that loss rate in the Air Force in peacetime. If nothing else, they couldn’t afford to replace the crew after only a few months’ flying.
The F-22 is far less dangerous than the shuttle, but it’s been grounded for months over the last few years after fatal crashes.
Edward,
I seem to recall there was a high accident rate in the X-Plane programs which had low flight rates. However Congress never bothered itself with it. Instead the researchers were allowed to figure out what happen and fix without Congressional grandstanding.
This evening I swung by a friend’s place where they’re building a replica Nieuport 17. The chief builder popped in to borrow an angle grinder to cut the windshield out of his Vans RV-10. His co-owner was cruising along at 170 mph and took a 10 pound buzzard square in the windshield. The buzzard put a 3″ dent in the back of the luggage compartment and left the co-owner picking plexiglass out of his face. You can’t really plan for things like that, but you could add sloping titanium struts to the Lynx windshield to make it more like a steam locomotive’s cow-catcher, or add a football linebacker’s face mask to your helmets. After all, you can’t be too safe…
Actually, the two-layer windscreen + canopy of Lynx will go a long way toward ameliorating the effects of a bird strike. The windscreen is built for 500 knot indicated airspeed, about 6 psi of dynamic pressure, and would break up and slow the carcass, helping protect the pressurized canopy.
We had birdstrikes on two consecutive flights of the Ez-Rocket in 2002 (wing and belly tank), so we are _very_ aware of bird strike issues.
At least you don’t have to worry about ingesting one into the engine.
One of the more absurd requirements we had to deal with on CEV was one that NASA came up with after the buzzard hit the ET on that Shuttle launch. They wanted the blast shield to handle a large bird strike at ten thousand feet (IIRC) near Max Q.
I remember when the squadrons at Laughlin AFB were switching from the T-37 to the new T-6. One of the things they worried about was how the new T-6 would take a buzzard strike. They noted that the T-37 could usually take one and keep flying, although there would be an occasional dent in the airframe.